This Handbook provides an accessible resource for all social work students, educators, practitioners, and policymakers to increase their knowledge and understanding of how research into the diversity and impact of child and family social work interventions might underpin and drive policy and practice.
Divided into six sections
• The Context of Child and Family Social Work Research
• Preventive and Reparative Responses to Children and Families
• Child Maltreatment: Causes, Consequences, and Responses
• Alternate Care as an Approach to Safeguarding Children and Young People
• Intervention: Therapeutic Responses to Vulnerable Children, Youth, and Families
• Child and Family Social Work in the Global Context
and comprising 52 newly written chapters by experts in the field, it provides a foundational overview of the field of child and family social work, including defining concepts, sentinel historical milestones, and the scope of practice. It also identifies developments in auxiliary fields such as neuroscience, psychology, education, health, poverty, and media
By illustrating diverse research endeavours in parenting, maltreatment, prevention, child protection, and substitutive interventions including foster care, residential care, adoption, and juvenile corrections and elaborating child welfare research methods, measures, and impacts on practice, it analyses evidence-based interventions and policies in early intervention, child protection, child placement, adoption, and advocacy.
It will be required reading for anyone working in social work and child protection.
0.Introduction. Section One – The Context of Child and Family Social Work Research. 1.Theoretical and value base of research in child and family social work: Three epistemological approaches. 2.Children’s rights and critical children’s rights studies in the context of child and family policy, practice and research. 3.Child well-being: Children’s perceptions and experiences. 4.The Changing and Challenging Nature of Child and Family Social Work and its Research. 5.Emerging Models, Research Designs, and Outcome Analyses in Child and Family Social Work. 6.“Evidence-Based Practice” in Child and Family Social Work – Progress and Controversies. 7.Research Evidence and Research Evidence Use: Conceptualization and Application to Child Protection. Section Two - Preventive and Reparative Responses to Children and Families. 8.A critical analysis of Early Intervention in the Irish Child Protection and Welfare system. 9.Multidimensional child poverty in Chile: dimensions that matter for child development. 10.Helping Parents with Substance Abuse Concerns: A Case Study on a Holistic Intervention and Support Programme for Parents Involved in Substance Misuse in Hong Kong. 11.Responding to families and children where there is domestic violence and coercive control. 12.Implementing a quasi-experimental research design to explore the effectiveness of family work in youth justice. 13.Enhancing Outcomes for Vulnerable Parents, Children, and Communities Using the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program System: Innovations and Future Directions. 14.Working with Fathers: A Scoping Review. Section Three – Child Maltreatment: Causes, Consequences, and Responses. 15.Poverty, Inequality and Child Maltreatment: What Does Research Tell Us? 16.Developing a global typology of child protection systems. 17.Protecting children under the law: Impact on children, young people and families. 18.Cultural Encounters in Intervention: Complicating Social Work. 19.Child welfare: Re-examining the risk threshold to investigate. 20.Using Strengths-based Research and Data in Child Welfare Assessment to Address the Overrepresentation of Black Families in U.S. Child Welfare Programs. 21. What has COVID-19 taught us about safeguarding children from maltreatment? Lessons learned from an international study. 22.Child sexual abuse (CSA): Dynamics, effects and responses. Section Four - Alternate Care as an Approach to Safeguarding Children and Young People. 23.Children in family foster care: Challenges and pitfalls through an analysis of placement disruptions. 24.Uncovering the relational complexity of kinship care – the power of qualitative research. 25.Therapeutic residential care: Practice components and barriers. 26.Understanding educational outcomes for children in care: Well-being, engagement and attainment in school. 27.Developmental Assets and Tutoring: Keys to Improving Educational Outcomes in the Ontario Looking After Children Project. 28.Nurturing family and social relationships while in care: Researching family contact and visitation. 29.First Families in context: the challenges of parent-carer partnership in out-of-home care. 30.Reunification in out-of-home care: Patterns and Predictors. 31.The Family Reunification Process in Child Welfare: The Challenge of Providing the Right Services at the Right Time. 32.Researching Transitions from Care: Lessons from a Longitudinal Study of Experiences and Outcomes of Young People. 33.Resilience of adult care leavers in Australia. 34.Coming Out in the Care System: Participatory Research with Care Experienced LGBTQ+ young people in England. 35. Adoption from care: Evolving directions in policy and practice from a comparative perspective. 36.Facilitating permanence and promoting the wellbeing of abused and neglected children through open adoption from care. 37.Forty years of research Adoption and Birth Fathers. Section Five - Intervention: Therapeutic Responses to Vulnerable Children, Youth, and Families. 38.The effectiveness of mental health and relational interventions for children in foster and kinship care. 39. Young Carers in the UK. 40.Investigating the Effectiveness of Resilience Interventions in Australian Youth and Its Variability Across Refugee and Non-Refugee Samples. 41.The Development of an Indigenous Connectedness Framework for Child Wellbeing. 42.Parent and family peer advocacy in child welfare: Transforming research, policy, and practice. 43.Integrated, Victim-Centred Family Therapy Following Parental Sexual Assault. Section Six – Child and Family Social Work in the Global Context. 44.Working with children from refugee and forcibly displaced backgrounds: Throw the “rule book” out! 45.Child trafficking and exploitation: Social work practice and children’s rights. 46.Breaking Barriers or Building Walls? Strategies to overcome the barriers to help-seeking among Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) survivors from refugee backgrounds. 47. Responding to the long term and changing needs of Unaccompanied and Separated Syrian children in Jordan: Learnings and implications for their transition to adulthood. 48.The Development of Child Protection Systems in Southeast Asia. 49.Child Labour in rural and urban Ghana: Stakeholders and Parental Perceptions of Working Children and Culture-appropriate Assessment. 50.Child Neglect and Inadequate Supervision in Policies in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. 51.Understanding social media in adoptee digital diasporas: Korean Australian intercountry adoption experiences. 52.Building resilience following major trauma: Learnings from children of the Shoah.
Elizabeth Fernandez, AM, PhD, MA, is Professor of Social Work, School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australia. Penelope Welbourne is Associate Professor of Social Work at Plymouth University. Bethany Lee, PhD, MSW, is the Richard P. Barth Professor of Children’s Services at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. Joyce L. C. Ma is Emeritus Professor, Department of Social Work at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Reviews for The Routledge Handbook of Child and Family Social Work Research: Knowledge-Building, Application, and Impact
The Routledge Handbook of Child and Family Social Work Research is an extraordinary venture led by superb scholars with impeccable timing. These more than 50 chapters exude child welfare research’s growing breadth and depth. These globe-spanning authors probe underlying value propositions of child welfare research, conceptual contributions, program evaluation, surveys, case studies, and causal models. Often drawing on cross-national data and descriptions the handbook confidently points the way to future opportunities. Richard P. Barth, PhD, MSW Professor and Past-President of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare This comprehensive collection drawing on research from more than 10 countries provides a rich, research-informed, reference for researchers, practitioners and policymakers. Aspects covered include child maltreatment, prevention, child and family interventions and global issues. A huge contribution to the field. Emeritus Professor Judy Sebba, Rees Centre, University of Oxford This handbook is an excellent resource for researchers, practitioners, and students of child welfare. It tackles key barriers to child well-being and presents approaches to child welfare research, and evidence informed interventions from different country and cultural perspectives. The handbook fills a gap in the literature. Professor Emeritus Margarita Frederico AM; DSci, La Trobe University, Australia