Don Collins

The voices of parents: A qualitative study of a family preservation program

Most studies of family preservation services have used quantitative methods to examine program success. This paper reports on interviews with primary caretakers of children who have been abused and those with behavior problems between six months and three and one half years after family preservation services ended. Primary caretakers were asked three questions: What did you find to be the most helpful in your counseling? What did you find that did not help or that you disliked about counseling? After family preservation services, what happened with respect to the problems for which you were initially referred? Families found the support and nontraditional approaches to counseling helpful. Parents with children who had been abused particularly appreciated the teaching component of services. Brevity of the services and switching workers midstream caused the most concern for families. Finally, how families fared after intervention fell into a continuum from improved to deteriorated. The implications of these findings for clinical practice and program development are discussed.

“You Didn't Throw Us to the Wolves”: Problem-Based Learning in a Social Work Family Class

Social work educators are challenged to create educational environments that are conducive to learning. PBL offers a structured and innovative learning experience different from a traditional theor...

Treatment trilogy of father-daughter incest

There exist three major and often contentious perspectives on the problem of father-daughter incest: Child advocacy, family systems, and reconstructive. All are described in terms of their theories of etiology, relationship with criminal justice systems, treatment approaches and research evidence. A synthesis of all approaches stresses the need for more research efforts demonstrating the efficacy of each approach.

Partnering with Parents: Family-Centred Practice in Children's Services

quantitative methods and allowing myself the occasional foray into descriptive statistics and frequency distributions. Personally, I might return to this book if I wanted to remind myself of the process involved in working through some of my quantitative analysis in order to brush off any rustiness. The chapters in the section on quantitative research were particularly clear and concise and would serve as a good checklist for supervisors and supervisees alike. The complexity of developing, executing and analysing the results of a survey was one of the best accounts I have read recently. The presentation of the book is clear and consistent, interspersed with some exercises and lots of practical examples to illustrate significant concepts and bullet pointed summaries. Relevant further reading is provided in the form of ‘If you asked us to recommend three books’ at the end of each chapter. This acknowledges that some students will need to pursue their special interests and allows those to pursue deeper understanding of the various topics across different disciplines. The authors recognise that this is a core and essential book and do not pretend otherwise, but it can also stand alone as a very useful handbook to students and their supervisors alike. Martin Davies and Nathan Hughes have provided a smart and portable text which suits a range of audiences at the beginning of their research experience. For those preparing to teach research methods, it is also a nice reference book in its modelling of accessible research pedagogy. Despite most of its examples being UK based, it is also suitable for a variety of international contexts although researching in different cultural contexts in not covered here. I would highly recommend it.