Professional-Family Help Giving Relationships in Family Support Programs

Abstract

A multiple case study design was used to test the hypothesis that human services program family resource coordinator practices that were consistent with the intent of family support principles would be associated with parent reported positive family outcomes and practices inconsistent with the intent of family support principles would be associated with parent reported negative family outcomes. Family support principles are belief and value statements about how families should be treated by family resource coordinators. Both pattern matching and replication logic were used to perform quantitative and qualitative data analysis. Results confirmed the predicted relationships between family resource coordinator practices and family outcomes. Implications for improving professional-family relationships in the context of help giving exchanges are described.

Keywords: family support, family resource coordinator practices, family outcomes, multiple case studies, replication logic, pattern matching