2019 · Study · English

Assessing an Adapted Approach to Communities That Care for Child Maltreatment Prevention

Salazar, A. M., Haggerty, K. P., Briney, J. S., Vann, T., Vinson, J., Lansing, M., Catalano, R. F., Pecora, P. J., & Haan, B. D.

Salazar, A. M., Haggerty, K. P., Briney, J. S., Vann, T., Vinson, J., Lansing, M., Catalano, R. F., Pecora, P. J., & Haan, B. D. (2019). Assessing an Adapted Approach to Communities That Care for Child Maltreatment Prevention. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 10(3), 349–369. doi.org/10.1086/704210

Summary

Evaluation of Keeping Families Together (KFT), an adaptation of Communities That Care that applies the same coalition-based mobilisation model to preventing child maltreatment community-wide in families with children aged 0 to 10. Data from the two Oregon communities implementing KFT were compared, about 3.5 years into implementation, with the 12 communities that delivered standard CTC in the site-randomised Community Youth Development Study. The comparison covered implementation quality, board functioning, community transformation (adoption of a science-based approach to prevention) and perceived sustainability. On board functioning, adoption of a science-based approach and sustainability, the adapted KFT sites were equal or superior to the standard CTC sites at the same point in time. The authors present KFT as a promising extension of CTC into child-protection prevention, and the study shows that the system's process can be re-aimed at an earlier age group and a different outcome without losing coalition quality.