Littell, Julia H

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
Graduate School of Social Work and Social
Research Faculty Research and Scholarship
Graduate School of Social Work and Social
Research
1999
Review of Family Preservation and Family Functioning,
by Jacquelyn McCroskey and William Meezan
Julia H. Littell
Bryn Mawr College, jlittell@brynmawr.edu
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/gsswsr_pubs
Part of the Social Work Commons
This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/gsswsr_pubs/8
For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.
Custom Citation
Littell, Julia H. Review of Family Preservation and Family Functioning, by Jacquelyn McCroskey and William Meezan. Social Service
Review 73 (1999): 600-603.
California’s Proposition 187 ‘‘is less a spasm of nativist hatred than an expression
of public frustration with a government and civil society that seem out of touch
and out of control’’ (p. 148). Yet later in the discussion he notes that Proposition
187 and English only laws ‘‘are grand gestures with few practical consequences
other than to convince politicians that many voters now view American society
as increasingly alien (literally) and uncontrollable’’ (p. 155). Such a statement
seems to contradict his previous assertion. Moreover, it is exactly the concern that
immigrants are creating an alien America that has historically motivated nativists.
Certainly not all who voted for Proposition 187 are nativists; but a cursory look at
the rhetoric used by many of its backers reveals language that demonizes illegal
and legal immigrants.
600 Social Service Review
‘‘The Politics of Rapid Legal Change: Immigration Policy, 1980–1990’’ pro-
vides an insightful review of immigration legislation passed in the 1980s and
1990s. Instead of seeing the United States as entering into a restrictionist period
of immigration, Schuck consistently argues that the United States is alone among
Western nations in having increased its immigration levels. He correctly notes
that efforts to restrict immigration have been almost entirely directed at slowing
the volume of illegal immigration. In another essay, ‘‘Refugee-Burden Sharing: A
Modest Proposal,’’ Schuck develops a proposal of considerable merit for reform-
ing the existing international system of protecting refugees. The idea is to have
regional plans for nation-states to handle refugee flows that will be monitored by
an international body such as the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refu-
gees. Once nation-states have agreed to refugee quotas, they should be permitted
to buy and sell refugee slots to one another. Had such a plan been in place for
the Western Hemisphere, the recent natural disaster in Central America, Hurri-
cane Mitch, would have been much easier to handle. Wealthy countries like the
United States and Canada could have dealt with their refugee burden by paying
countries like Mexico and Costa Rica to provide shelter. Such an arrangement
offers immediate relief and recognizes that once it is safe to return, most refugees
will do so. Permanent and expensive resettlement is not always the answer.
Like many other compilations of essays, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens is an
uneven work. The essays vary in quality (although most are excellent) and con-
tent, and they contain repetitions. Given the nature of the book, that is probably
unavoidable. Nevertheless, Schuck has put together a thoughtful collection of
essays that tackle many contemporary immigration issues. For those wishing to
understand the complex and confusing terrain of immigration, Schuck is a good
guide.
David W. Engstrom
New Mexico Highlands University
Family Preservation and Family Functioning. By Jacquelyn McCroskey and Wil-
liam Meezan. Washington, D.C.: CWLA Press, 1997. Pp. 382. $24.95 (paper).
In the late 1980s, Jacquelyn McCroskey and William Meezan began their inten-
sive study of two home-based programs in Los Angeles County, and the family
preservation movement was just gaining momentum in the United States. Within
a few years most states were providing short-term, intensive, in-home services
aimed at keeping families of abused and neglected children together. Then came
a backlash, as some argued that the movement had gone too far at the expense
of the safety and well-being of vulnerable children. In turn, questions were raised
about the need for large-scale efforts to prevent out-of-home placements and us-
ing short-term, family-based intervention as a means to that end. At the same
time, several large, controlled studies indicated that family preservation (FP) pro-
grams were not preserving many families. However, debates about the wisdom
and viability of family preservation policies have not hampered the expansion
of services that have been developed under this rubric. Dozens of service deliv-
ery programs that aim to strengthen—but not necessarily to preserve—families
have been left in the wake of the family preservation movement. And although
their objectives have shifted, most are still identified as ‘‘family preservation’’
programs.
Counter to the prevailing wisdom of the 1980s, McCroskey and Meezan em-
barked on a rigorous evaluation of relatively nonintensive, family-based pro-
grams in which the placement prevention objective took a backseat to improving
individual and family functioning. Unlike other rigorous FP evaluations, their
study had much closer links to direct practice than to policy. This work is particu-
larly important now that many FP programs are similar (in both philosophy and
approach) to those they evaluated.
The authors employed a randomized experiment to assess the impact of home-
based FP services compared with ‘‘regular’’ child welfare services. Two private
agency FP programs were studied, one with an average of 12 1-hour contacts per
family over a span of more than 14 weeks, the other with about 11 90-minute
contacts with each family in less than 14 weeks. Each agency had its own control
group whose services were provided by the public child welfare agency. Longitu-
dinal data were gathered from multiple sources, and parents were interviewed
within a few weeks of random assignment, at 3 months into the study, and then
at 15 months. In addition to an original measure of family functioning, devel-
oped in close collaboration with agency staff, the authors used several standard-
ized instruments—the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), Child Behavior Checklist
(CBCL), and Caldwell HOME—that are staples of research on parents and chil-
dren but are too rarely used in child welfare research. The authors’ engagement
of agency staff and other stakeholders in this vigorous research effort is particu-
larly impressive, as is their candor in discussing the choices and trade-offs that
had to be made and the lessons that they learned in hindsight. This book is worth
reading for these lessons alone.
Like virtually all program evaluations, this study encountered unforeseen
problems in the field. There was considerable attrition: 36 percent of the families
could not be located within a few weeks after random assignment, almost half
were missing at 3 months, and about 60 percent could not be found for the 15-
month interviews. (Although the authors present some analysis of factors associ-
ated with this attrition, the analysis could have been developed further.) Family
preservation services were carefully documented, but little information was avail-
able on services that were provided to the control group. From the little that we
know about this, it appears that control cases received services that were not dra-
matically different from those provided to FP cases. This renders the study’s cen-
tral comparison unclear. And, as a result of attrition, the sample size (75 FP cases
and 77 control cases at 15 months) does not support the kind of multivariate
analysis needed to unravel interrelations among factors that appear to be associ-
ated with within-group changes over time. For these reasons, few firm conclusions
can be drawn. Even so, the authors almost exhaust the analytic potential of their
data, and their work yields many interesting questions for further research.
In three long chapters, the authors report findings that include a few signifi-
cant differences and some trends favoring the FP treatment group. Within each
geographic area, FP and control cases had similar outcomes, probably because
the services provided to the program and control groups were not very distinct.
Book Reviews 601
Here, a firm conclusion can be drawn: compared with regular child welfare ser-
vices, neither of the two relatively nonintensive FP models resulted in substan-
tial improvements in individual or family functioning, nor did they affect out-of-
home placement rates.
A separate analysis of change over time by agency shows that the CBSC pro-
gram group and its comparison group (in South Central Los Angeles) improved
during the intervention and declined during the follow-up period. The pattern
was reversed for the HCS program group (in the northern San Fernando Valley)
with declines during intervention and improvements thereafter in both its pro-
gram and control groups. More contextual information might have been used to
link community-level factors to observed changes in family functioning—but that
was not within the scope of the study.
One of the most important contributions of this work is the further develop-
ment and testing of a practice-based measure of family functioning, the Family
Assessment Form (FAF). The FAF may help caseworkers assess the social func-
tioning of parents and children, interactions among some dyads within the fam-
ily, and environmental support for the family. McCroskey and Meezan do not
present the FAF as a one-size-fits-all solution to agencies’ needs for careful indi-
vidual and family assessments. Rather, they suggest that this model can help work-
ers assess family strengths and weaknesses and capture change over time. In ad-
dition, McCroskey and Meezan do not claim to have solved the many definitional
and measurement problems encountered in attempts to assess family function-
ing, but their conceptual and empirical analysis of various domains of family
functioning is extraordinarily useful. Some data on reliability and validity are pre-
sented, but the authors might have pushed this analysis further by examining the
concordance of some of the FAF items with information obtained on the Cald-
well HOME.
Ultimately, this book is about the influence of perspective on what is per-
ceived—and McCroskey and Meezan are at their best when dealing with these
complicated issues. There were substantial discrepancies between FP workers’
ratings of family functioning and parental symptomatology and the ratings gen-
erated by researchers, which were based on interviews with parents. Worker re-
ports were more internally consistent, indicating more problems in functioning
and more pathology at the outset, and then greater improvement over time. Par-
ents in the FP group reported few problems in family functioning at the begin-
ning. Based on parent reports, there were significant improvements in family
living conditions, but these only emerged after the end of treatment. In con-
trast, FP workers reported significant change during the intervention period.
McCroskey and Meezan suggest that workers view family functioning as a set
of interrelated phenomena (hence, high correlations among worker ratings on
different dimensions of family functioning), while parents tend to identify prob-
lems in more circumscribed areas and may minimize their difficulties. The au-
thors also offer an alternative explanation: workers may need to ‘‘see’’ more
problems and improvement in clients in order to justify their occupational exis-
tence. Hence, the more global view of family functioning presented by workers
may reflect their biases, not careful differential assessment. Indeed, there is
some evidence that worker ratings of parental pathology may have been inflated
(research interviewers’ ratings of parental psychopathology were closer to BSI
scores). Compared with workers, parents may more accurately pinpoint their own
problems and strengths and the limited impact of short-term intervention. In any
case, McCroskey and Meezan note that this clash of perspectives does not force
us to choose one over the other. Rather, each perspective may tell us a great deal
about the observer as well as the phenomena being observed.
Like their subjects, McCroskey and Meezan are not entirely neutral observers
602 Social Service Review
in this enterprise; their interpretations tend to present the FP programs and their
practitioner-colleagues in a very favorable light. They attribute relatively small
changes (e.g., in CBCL scores) to the FP program when other explanations (such
as statistical regression toward the mean) are equally plausible. The inconclusive
nature of their findings seems to invite many post hoc explanations. Nonetheless,
they do provide a wealth of well-informed, thoughtful observations and direc-
tions for further research, clearly labeling these as ideas, not facts. But in their
attempt to mine this gold, McCroskey and Meezan make some logical missteps.
For example, in light of the fact that central features of the two service delivery
models—the frequency and length of contacts, the emphasis on counseling or
teaching and demonstration, and the duration of FP services—did not matter,
they conclude that ‘‘the philosophy of family-based services in general, rather
than the specifics of its implementation, is the key to improving family function-
ing’’ (p. 248). Since research interviewers did not pick up significant between-
group differences in family functioning at 3 months, however, there is no ‘‘im-
provement’’ to explain. It is possible that the FP intervention had a ‘‘sleeper’’
effect, but even so, it would be difficult to attribute delayed improvements in
family living conditions to program philosophies. Similarly, the authors speculate
that some out-of-home placements in the control group might have been pre-
vented by FP services because the FP treatment improved family living conditions
and poor living conditions were predictive of placement in control cases. Because
there were no significant between-group differences in placement rates, however,
we have to conclude that the FP programs did not prevent placements.
In spite of these problems, the book is well worth reading for several reasons:
it illustrates a successful collaboration between researchers and practitioners, de-
scribes problems often encountered in field experiments, grapples with some of
the central issues in the conceptualization and measurement of family function-
ing, delves into fascinating issues of perception and subjectivity, and raises many
questions that the field has not yet answered. The book is very accessible and will
be particularly useful to practitioners, program administrators, policy makers,
researchers, and funders interested in home-based services, family functioning,
field experiments, or subjectivity. Seasoned researchers, however, will not find all
the details that they expect.
Most important, McCroskey and Meezan’s work reminds us that solutions to
the problems these families face will not be quick or easy—and may depend as
much (or more) on community, economic, and environmental conditions as on
individual or family-level intervention.
Julia H. Littell
Bryn Mawr College
Nonprofit Organizations in an Age of Uncertainty: A Study of Organizational
Change. Joseph Galaskiewicz and Wolfgang Bielefeld. New York: Aldine de Gruy-
ter, 1998. Pp. 290. $23.75 (cloth).
This ambitious study examines organizational change among nonprofit organi-
zations in the generous, research-rich metropolis of Minneapolis–St. Paul. The
analyses are based on a panel of agencies randomly selected from (potentially
biased) internal revenue data. Survey data were collected four times between
1980 and 1992. Other information supplements the panel through 1994.
This is not a work to read for the details of service delivery, analyses of changes
Book Reviews 603


Review of \u3ci\u3eFamily Preservation and Family Functioning\u3c/i\u3e, by Jacquelyn McCroskey and William Meezan

Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College | Bryn Mawr College Research

Bryn Mawr CollegeScholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn MawrCollegeGraduate School of Social Work and SocialResearch Faculty Research and ScholarshipGraduate School of Social Work and SocialResearch1999Review of Family Preservation and Family Functioning,by Jacquelyn McCroskey and William MeezanJulia H. LittellBryn Mawr College, jlittell@brynmawr.eduLet us know how access to this document benefits you.Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/gsswsr_pubsPart of the Social Work CommonsThis paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/gsswsr_pubs/8For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.Custom CitationLittell, Julia H. Review of Family Preservation and Family Functioning, by Jacquelyn McCroskey and William Meezan. Social ServiceReview 73 (1999): 600-603.California’s Proposition 187 ‘‘is less a spasm of nativist hatred than an expressionof public frustration with a government and civil society that seem out of touchand out of control’’ (p. 148). Yet later in the discussion he notes that Proposition187 and English only laws ‘‘are grand gestures with few practical consequencesother than to convince politicians that many voters now view American societyas increasingly alien (literally) and uncontrollable’’ (p. 155). Such a statementseems to contradict his previous assertion. Moreover, it is exactly the concern thatimmigrants are creating an alien America that has historically motivated nativists.Certainly not all who voted for Proposition 187 are nativists; but a cursory look atthe rhetoric used by many of its backers reveals language that demonizes illegaland legal immigrants.600 Social Service Review‘‘The Politics of Rapid Legal Change: Immigration Policy, 1980–1990’’ pro-vides an insightful review of immigration legislation passed in the 1980s and1990s. Instead of seeing the United States as entering into a restrictionist periodof immigration, Schuck consistently argues that the United States is alone amongWestern nations in having increased its immigration levels. He correctly notesthat efforts to restrict immigration have been almost entirely directed at slowingthe volume of illegal immigration. In another essay, ‘‘Refugee-Burden Sharing: AModest Proposal,’’ Schuck develops a proposal of considerable merit for reform-ing the existing international system of protecting refugees. The idea is to haveregional plans for nation-states to handle refugee flows that will be monitored byan international body such as the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refu-gees. Once nation-states have agreed to refugee quotas, they should be permittedto buy and sell refugee slots to one another. Had such a plan been in place forthe Western Hemisphere, the recent natural disaster in Central America, Hurri-cane Mitch, would have been much easier to handle. Wealthy countries like theUnited States and Canada could have dealt with their refugee burden by payingcountries like Mexico and Costa Rica to provide shelter. Such an arrangementoffers immediate relief and recognizes that once it is safe to return, most refugeeswill do so. Permanent and expensive resettlement is not always the answer.Like many other compilations of essays, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens is anuneven work. The essays vary in quality (although most are excellent) and con-tent, and they contain repetitions. Given the nature of the book, that is probablyunavoidable. Nevertheless, Schuck has put together a thoughtful collection ofessays that tackle many contemporary immigration issues. For those wishing tounderstand the complex and confusing terrain of immigration, Schuck is a goodguide.David W. EngstromNew Mexico Highlands UniversityFamily Preservation and Family Functioning. By Jacquelyn McCroskey and Wil-liam Meezan. Washington, D.C.: CWLA Press, 1997. Pp. 382. $24.95 (paper).In the late 1980s, Jacquelyn McCroskey and William Meezan began their inten-sive study of two home-based programs in Los Angeles County, and the familypreservation movement was just gaining momentum in the United States. Withina few years most states were providing short-term, intensive, in-home servicesaimed at keeping families of abused and neglected children together. Then camea backlash, as some argued that the movement had gone too far at the expenseof the safety and well-being of vulnerable children. In turn, questions were raisedabout the need for large-scale efforts to prevent out-of-home placements and us-ing short-term, family-based intervention as a means to that end. At the sametime, several large, controlled studies indicated that family preservation (FP) pro-grams were not preserving many families. However, debates about the wisdomand viability of family preservation policies have not hampered the expansionof services that have been developed under this rubric. Dozens of service deliv-ery programs that aim to strengthen—but not necessarily to preserve—familieshave been left in the wake of the family preservation movement. And althoughtheir objectives have shifted, most are still identified as ‘‘family preservation’’programs.Counter to the prevailing wisdom of the 1980s, McCroskey and Meezan em-barked on a rigorous evaluation of relatively nonintensive, family-based pro-grams in which the placement prevention objective took a backseat to improvingindividual and family functioning. Unlike other rigorous FP evaluations, theirstudy had much closer links to direct practice than to policy. This work is particu-larly important now that many FP programs are similar (in both philosophy andapproach) to those they evaluated.The authors employed a randomized experiment to assess the impact of home-based FP services compared with ‘‘regular’’ child welfare services. Two privateagency FP programs were studied, one with an average of 12 1-hour contacts perfamily over a span of more than 14 weeks, the other with about 11 90-minutecontacts with each family in less than 14 weeks. Each agency had its own controlgroup whose services were provided by the public child welfare agency. Longitu-dinal data were gathered from multiple sources, and parents were interviewedwithin a few weeks of random assignment, at 3 months into the study, and thenat 15 months. In addition to an original measure of family functioning, devel-oped in close collaboration with agency staff, the authors used several standard-ized instruments—the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), Child Behavior Checklist(CBCL), and Caldwell HOME—that are staples of research on parents and chil-dren but are too rarely used in child welfare research. The authors’ engagementof agency staff and other stakeholders in this vigorous research effort is particu-larly impressive, as is their candor in discussing the choices and trade-offs thathad to be made and the lessons that they learned in hindsight. This book is worthreading for these lessons alone.Like virtually all program evaluations, this study encountered unforeseenproblems in the field. There was considerable attrition: 36 percent of the familiescould not be located within a few weeks after random assignment, almost halfwere missing at 3 months, and about 60 percent could not be found for the 15-month interviews. (Although the authors present some analysis of factors associ-ated with this attrition, the analysis could have been developed further.) Familypreservation services were carefully documented, but little information was avail-able on services that were provided to the control group. From the little that weknow about this, it appears that control cases received services that were not dra-matically different from those provided to FP cases. This renders the study’s cen-tral comparison unclear. And, as a result of attrition, the sample size (75 FP casesand 77 control cases at 15 months) does not support the kind of multivariateanalysis needed to unravel interrelations among factors that appear to be associ-ated with within-group changes over time. For these reasons, few firm conclusionscan be drawn. Even so, the authors almost exhaust the analytic potential of theirdata, and their work yields many interesting questions for further research.In three long chapters, the authors report findings that include a few signifi-cant differences and some trends favoring the FP treatment group. Within eachgeographic area, FP and control cases had similar outcomes, probably becausethe services provided to the program and control groups were not very distinct.Book Reviews 601Here, a firm conclusion can be drawn: compared with regular child welfare ser-vices, neither of the two relatively nonintensive FP models resulted in substan-tial improvements in individual or family functioning, nor did they affect out-of-home placement rates.A separate analysis of change over time by agency shows that the CBSC pro-gram group and its comparison group (in South Central Los Angeles) improvedduring the intervention and declined during the follow-up period. The patternwas reversed for the HCS program group (in the northern San Fernando Valley)with declines during intervention and improvements thereafter in both its pro-gram and control groups. More contextual information might have been used tolink community-level factors to observed changes in family functioning—but thatwas not within the scope of the study.One of the most important contributions of this work is the further develop-ment and testing of a practice-based measure of family functioning, the FamilyAssessment Form (FAF). The FAF may help caseworkers assess the social func-tioning of parents and children, interactions among some dyads within the fam-ily, and environmental support for the family. McCroskey and Meezan do notpresent the FAF as a one-size-fits-all solution to agencies’ needs for careful indi-vidual and family assessments. Rather, they suggest that this model can help work-ers assess family strengths and weaknesses and capture change over time. In ad-dition, McCroskey and Meezan do not claim to have solved the many definitionaland measurement problems encountered in attempts to assess family function-ing, but their conceptual and empirical analysis of various domains of familyfunctioning is extraordinarily useful. Some data on reliability and validity are pre-sented, but the authors might have pushed this analysis further by examining theconcordance of some of the FAF items with information obtained on the Cald-well HOME.Ultimately, this book is about the influence of perspective on what is per-ceived—and McCroskey and Meezan are at their best when dealing with thesecomplicated issues. There were substantial discrepancies between FP workers’ratings of family functioning and parental symptomatology and the ratings gen-erated by researchers, which were based on interviews with parents. Worker re-ports were more internally consistent, indicating more problems in functioningand more pathology at the outset, and then greater improvement over time. Par-ents in the FP group reported few problems in family functioning at the begin-ning. Based on parent reports, there were significant improvements in familyliving conditions, but these only emerged after the end of treatment. In con-trast, FP workers reported significant change during the intervention period.McCroskey and Meezan suggest that workers view family functioning as a setof interrelated phenomena (hence, high correlations among worker ratings ondifferent dimensions of family functioning), while parents tend to identify prob-lems in more circumscribed areas and may minimize their difficulties. The au-thors also offer an alternative explanation: workers may need to ‘‘see’’ moreproblems and improvement in clients in order to justify their occupational exis-tence. Hence, the more global view of family functioning presented by workersmay reflect their biases, not careful differential assessment. Indeed, there issome evidence that worker ratings of parental pathology may have been inflated(research interviewers’ ratings of parental psychopathology were closer to BSIscores). Compared with workers, parents may more accurately pinpoint their ownproblems and strengths and the limited impact of short-term intervention. In anycase, McCroskey and Meezan note that this clash of perspectives does not forceus to choose one over the other. Rather, each perspective may tell us a great dealabout the observer as well as the phenomena being observed.Like their subjects, McCroskey and Meezan are not entirely neutral observers602 Social Service Reviewin this enterprise; their interpretations tend to present the FP programs and theirpractitioner-colleagues in a very favorable light. They attribute relatively smallchanges (e.g., in CBCL scores) to the FP program when other explanations (suchas statistical regression toward the mean) are equally plausible. The inconclusivenature of their findings seems to invite many post hoc explanations. Nonetheless,they do provide a wealth of well-informed, thoughtful observations and direc-tions for further research, clearly labeling these as ideas, not facts. But in theirattempt to mine this gold, McCroskey and Meezan make some logical missteps.For example, in light of the fact that central features of the two service deliverymodels—the frequency and length of contacts, the emphasis on counseling orteaching and demonstration, and the duration of FP services—did not matter,they conclude that ‘‘the philosophy of family-based services in general, ratherthan the specifics of its implementation, is the key to improving family function-ing’’ (p. 248). Since research interviewers did not pick up significant between-group differences in family functioning at 3 months, however, there is no ‘‘im-provement’’ to explain. It is possible that the FP intervention had a ‘‘sleeper’’effect, but even so, it would be difficult to attribute delayed improvements infamily living conditions to program philosophies. Similarly, the authors speculatethat some out-of-home placements in the control group might have been pre-vented by FP services because the FP treatment improved family living conditionsand poor living conditions were predictive of placement in control cases. Becausethere were no significant between-group differences in placement rates, however,we have to conclude that the FP programs did not prevent placements.In spite of these problems, the book is well worth reading for several reasons:it illustrates a successful collaboration between researchers and practitioners, de-scribes problems often encountered in field experiments, grapples with some ofthe central issues in the conceptualization and measurement of family function-ing, delves into fascinating issues of perception and subjectivity, and raises manyquestions that the field has not yet answered. The book is very accessible and willbe particularly useful to practitioners, program administrators, policy makers,researchers, and funders interested in home-based services, family functioning,field experiments, or subjectivity. Seasoned researchers, however, will not find allthe details that they expect.Most important, McCroskey and Meezan’s work reminds us that solutions tothe problems these families face will not be quick or easy—and may depend asmuch (or more) on community, economic, and environmental conditions as onindividual or family-level intervention.Julia H. LittellBryn Mawr CollegeNonprofit Organizations in an Age of Uncertainty: A Study of OrganizationalChange. Joseph Galaskiewicz and Wolfgang Bielefeld. New York: Aldine de Gruy-ter, 1998. Pp. 290. $23.75 (cloth).This ambitious study examines organizational change among nonprofit organi-zations in the generous, research-rich metropolis of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Theanalyses are based on a panel of agencies randomly selected from (potentiallybiased) internal revenue data. Survey data were collected four times between1980 and 1992. Other information supplements the panel through 1994.This is not a work to read for the details of service delivery, analyses of changesBook Reviews 603

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Review of \u3ci\u3eFamily Preservation and Family Functioning\u3c/i\u3e, by Jacquelyn McCroskey and William Meezan

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Scholarship; Research; and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College | Bryn Mawr College Research