Research and Evaluation Associate Dartmouth Center for Program Design and Evaluation Evansville, Indiana, United States
Grant-required reporting, while helpful for understanding family and child outcomes across grantees, rarely includes data which captures the nuances of an individual family’s recovery journey. Moreover, quantitative data is often insufficient for characterizing the complex lives of families affected by substance use disorders (SUDs) which influence outcomes. Evaluators working with the Partners to Promote Safety, Permanency and Well-Being for Families Affected by Substance Use (P2P) Wraparound Project have used a mixed methods longitudinal design to contextualize and humanize the grant-required data from standardized instruments and state administrative data specific to parent recovery and child safety and permanency. The evaluation includes additional data collected through interviews with parents and community partners, parent engagement measures associated with the Wraparound intervention, and collaboration and outreach data to provide explanatory power and meaning to standardized measures of parental and child outcomes. This data is also shared with community partners and funders to provide a fuller and more humanistic portrait of family barriers and facilitators to participation in the intervention and guide program improvements. We have also been able to leverage this data to enhance recruitment, partner engagement, and advocacy through public service announcements and podcasts. In this presentation, we will review the additional data we have collected and how we use this data to provide a more holistic view of the journeys our parents and families travel as they navigate recovery, parenting, child welfare involvement, and health services. We will also discuss challenges and accomplishments within this framework.
