Commentary on A Needs Assessment Examining Low-Income Fathers’ Barriers to Participation in Parenting Programs

The article provides insight on issues serving as barriers to low-income fathers\u27 involvement with their children and with parenting programs

The Impact of Welfare Reform On Infants & Toddlers, Their Families, & Their Communities: The Role of Early Head Start & Head Start

This study is a qualitative inquiry investigating how perspectives of welfare reform implementation may change or evolve from (a) state level policy makers, (b) county or local administrators responsible for implementing the policies, (c) social service workers directly involved with welfare recipients, (d) Head Start/Early Head Start program staff interacting with both the social service workers and the families they serve, and e) families currently or previously on cash assistance

Exploring fathering roles in low-income families: The influence of intergenerational transmission

This is the published version. Copyright Alliance for Children and FamiliesThis study explores the meaning of fathering among men identified as fathers or father figures of 24-month-old children enrolled in Early Head Start research sites. Fathers were asked open-ended questions about their experiences of being fathers and their relationships with their own fathers. These men spoke of how important “being there” was for them in their relationship with their child as well as how the relationship with their own fathers influenced them as a parent. This study supports the theory of intergenerational parenting and furthers our knowledge and understanding of what some men feel are important aspects of being a good father. A theoretical framework on why men may model their father’s behaviors is offered, as are implications for practitioners

First Things First: Creating the Conditions and Capacity for Community-Wide Reform in an Urban School District

Documents the strategies and activities of the First Things First initiative from the preparatory phase of the initiative through the first year of implementation in Kansas City and reports on its early results

Positive Adaptation and Coping Strengths of Families who have Children with Disabilities

Families who have a member with a disability have long been objects of pity. Society as a whole tends to view the presence of a child with a disability as an unutterable tragedy from which the family may never recover. Researchers and service providers in the field of developmental disabilities have mirrored this societal perception, and tend to view the family as a whole as embroiled in a series of acute crises interspersed with chronic sorrow (Olshansky, 1962). Thus the task of family support is seen as ameliorating the deadly pall of tragedy that hangs over the family. The day-to-day experiences of many thoughtful service providers, however, cas

Measuring the quality of family-professional partnerships in special education services

This is the published version, also found here: http://cec.metapress.com/content/jr8655lg61k1n440/?p=edbc223bb2fb4291b6b55663014711a2&pi=3One difficulty in monitoring the quality of family-professional partnerships has been the lack of a psychometrically acceptable and sufficiently general instrument with which to assess them. The current work describes the development of the Family-Professional Partnership Scale, which assesses parents' perceptions of the importance of and their satisfaction with family-professional partnerships. Indicators were constructed from qualitative research on families with children with and without disabilities, and the scale was refined across two field tests that included families with children with a wide range of ages and disability types and severity. Both the 18-item overall scale and the two 9-item subscales demonstrated excellent psychometric properties. The possible uses of this scale in future research and service delivery are discus

Proposal of indexes to evaluate Family Quality of Life, Partnership, and Family Support Needs

In recent years, research on the families of persons with Intellectual Disability (ID) has focused on the factors that contribute to the improvement of their Family Quality of Life (FQoL), such as the support they get and their partnership with professionals. However, due to the complexity of the variables related to FQoL and support needs and adequacy, measuring these constructs is difficult and multidimensional. To do this, the aim of this study is to generate new indexes through a series of instruments and assess their feasibility to improve the evaluation process and not reduce the situation to single measurements. We applied 3 instruments adapted to the Spanish population - Service Inventory, Beach Center Family-Professional Partnership Scale, and Beach Center FQOL - to a sample of 202 families of children with ID and we studied the indexes. The results show that the new indexes were designed to make FQoL measurements more easily manageable and interpretable. In fact, we found a statistical significant correlation between partial indexes (p < .001) in relation to the total score and very high sensibility of the indexes in relation to the degree of disability (p < .001). They also facilitate conducting complex analyses without having to discard any relevant measurement dimension

Knowledge-to-Action Guides: Preparing Families to Be Partners in Making Educational Decisions

Posted in application of the KU Faculty's Open Access policy