In-Home Family-Focused Reunification: A Six-Year Follow-Up of a Successful Experiment

The services provided to 120 children (62 experimental and 58 control) by state welfare agencies were followed for six years. When identified initially, all of the children were in out-of-home placements. After a 12-month follow-up of an experimental 90-day intensive in-home, family-based intervention, 75 percent of the children in the experimental group were reunified with their families, compared with 49 percent of the children in the control group who received routine child welfare services. Over six years, using state computer databases, it was determined that the children in the experimental group required less supervision time, lived at home longer, and were in less-restrictive placements than those in the control group. At the time all public agency involvement was terminated, two-thirds of the experimental families were classified as "stabilized," compared with approximately one-third of the control group. The experimental treatment had a substantial effect on families, which continued throughout the six-year follow-up period. Key words: family preservation services; longitudinal study; long-term effects; out-of-home placement; reunificatian The use of intensive family preservation services is fraught with controversy. Among the legitimate challenges are questions about its long-term effects--sustained by a paucity of defensible research. Timorously we enter the fray with the following report of a six-year follow-up study of a successful application of intensive family-based services (IFBSs) to reunify with their families a group of children who had been placed in out-of-home care. IFBS IN REUNIFYING FAMILIES Intensive family-based services--frequently known as family preservation services--are distinguished from conventional child welfare services in several ways. The focus for treatment is the family, not just the child. Caseworkers are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to deal with crises or emergency situations. Treatment plans are flexible and comprehensive, tailored to the specific needs of the family. Services are intense, and caseworkers may visit the families multiple times during the week and may spend large blocks of time with the family as situations demand. This intensity is made possible by the small number of cases given to each caseworker. The duration of services is limited, usually to two to four months. But intensive family-based services caseworkers make increased efforts to indentify informal, as well as formal, resources to help families access a network of ongoing services that remain in place after the intensive services terminate. IFBSs have been used broadly in an effort to strengthen families and to prevent unnecessary out-of-home placements (for example, Auclaire & Schwartz, 1986; Feldman, 1991; Fraser, Pecora, & Haapala, 1991; Henggeler, Melton, & Smith, 1992; Nelson & Landsman, 1992). These programs were used infrequently, however, in reunifying families after out-of-home placement (Walton, 1991). In recent years increased attention has been given to the planned process of reconnecting children in out-of-home care with their families (Maluccio, Abramczyk, & Thomlison, 1996). Accordingly, IFBS programs also have received increased attention in the context of reunification. Gillespie, Byrne, and Workman (1995), after reviewing several studies in which IFBSs were used in foster care reunification, found rates of successful reunification ranging from 38 percent to 75 percent one year from the date of return. In their own pilot reunification research project, in which elements of the IFBS model were combined with foster care-related services with 42 foster children, these authors reported that 79 percent were reunited successfully with their families. Generalizations from their findings are limited, however, because participant selection was not random and because there was no control group. Although IFBS programs increasingly have been used in family reunification, concerns about the long-term effectiveness of IFBSs have also increased. …