Voices of Pioneers section features Margaret Harrison of United Kingdom who founded HOME-START movement in Leicester, England, in 1973. Notes that HOME-START now has 150 programs throughout United Kingdom and in other countries and that program trains volunteers to offer support, friendship, and practical help to young families under stress in…

Critiques recent outcome research on brief intensive family preservation services designed to serve at-risk population. Includes examination of program evaluation efforts, quasi-experimental studies, and experimental designs. Considers subject characteristics, research designs, outcome measures, features of family preservation services, and major…

Presents information from interviews for Amish Study, study undertaken to understand, from rural family's perspective, experience of having received in-home family services. Describes barriers to service found by rural families and presents two cases from Amish Study. Considers need for outreach to rural families. (NB)

Tested the effectiveness of intensive, in-home family reunification services in reunifying families separated by the placement of a child in out-of-home care. After 90 days, 93% of the families assigned to receive the intensive treatment were reunited, compared to 28% of families in a control group who received routine out-of-home care services.…

Describes a continuum of services to families in their homes to prevent the necessity of child placement. Presents four categories of services--general case management, the comprehensive social worker, the in-house team, and the intraagency team--to aid families who demonstrate psychological difficulty and resource deficits. (Author/JAC)

Describes a project designed to reach low-income, multiproblem families, utilizing couples therapy in the home. Reviews major characteristics of multiproblem families. Emphasized therapeutic techniques based on modeling, role playing, and demonstration. Designed tasks which increased the individual and couple functioning of spouses. Reinforced…

Compared outcomes of child welfare investigative decisions enhanced by the use of brief, intensive, family preservation services with those of unenhanced decisions. Found differences between the number of cases opened, length of time a case was open, length of time the child was at home, and the families' satisfaction with the agency. (Author/SD)

Describes an approach to welfare services based on a home visitor model. Notes that child welfare agencies have moved to a decidedly short-term orientation toward service delivery, whereas the problems faced by many families require a more long-term approach, with services designed to address problems with roots in a host of social, economic, and…

Presents an exploratory, descriptive study on family-centered, home-based services, involving a secondary analysis of an existing database. Suggests that both these services are effective in the prevention of placement for both high- and low-risk clients. Notes, however, that home-based services seemed to be more effective with multi-problem…