Engaging families as experts: Collaborative family program development
Dr. Peter Fraenkel • 2006
Dr. Peter Fraenkel presents a culturally-sensitive approach to engaging economically- and socially-marginalized families as co-creators of community-based programs to strengthen their resilience. He examines this approach through his work with families in homeless shelters and domestic violence shelters.
The approach involves extensive qualitative interviews with families and a multiple family discussion group format for fostering resilience and family empowerment.
The ten steps of collaborative family program development are:
Initiating the project, forming collaborative professional relationships, and engaging senior mentors as cultural and methodological consultants
Intensive interviewing of family members
Intensive interviewing of agency professionals
Phrase-by-phrase qualitative coding
Creating program formats and contents (group discussion themes, exercises) and writing initial manual
Piloting of group with session-by-session evaluations by participants
Revising the program and manual
Intensive interviewing of families for each subsequent group cycle
Evaluating the effectiveness of the program in matched comparison or randomized designs
Disseminating and adapting program to other settings
