Child Well-Being Scales (CWBS) in the assessment of families and children in home-care intervention: an empirical study

This paper reports research carried out in Italy designed to investigate the usability of Child Well-Being Scale (CWBS) for the outcome evaluation of home-care interventions for vulnerable families and children in need. Using a pre- and post-test design, the study traces the changes in 18 vulnerable families and 23 children in need included in a programme of home-care intervention over a period of 11 months. All the families and children were assessed twice: at intake and at the end of the intervention (after 6 months). Furthermore, 10 families and 11 children had a longer intervention and were assessed three times. Moreover, two focus groups involving 13 homecare workers and 11 face-to-face interviews were used to collect practitioners’ points of views on CWBS. The results generally support the idea that families’ and children’s situation improved over time, as shown by an improvement in almost all of the considered dimensions after 6 months and after 11 months. Specifically, the families improved more on household adequacy in the long term while children on the child performance dimension improved in the short term. Practitioners reported that CWBS was an aid to multi-professional decision-making, as the systematic evaluation of the subscales was a practical base upon which to activate shared decision-making during the casework.