The European Family Support Network (EurofamNet) is a pan-European network made of more than 160 academics, practitioners and policy makers from 35 countries, funded as a COST action, with the purpose of informing family support policies and practices at European and national level. EurofamNet actively engages with the global call for citizens services to meet highest quality standards, offering the best evidence in order to provide effective responses that can actually improve children, young people and families’ lives. The aim of this symposium is to present EurofamNet progress in key areas that constitute current challenges for an evidence-informed policy and practice at European level. Four presentations will be introduced, coordinated by a discussant.
The first presentation proposes a new comprehensive approach to think about family support policy, provision and practice based on the findings of a scoping study which incorporated a literature review, a policy review and 27 national reports. The presentation proposes an analytical framework that examines how family and parenting support provision for parents, children and families is significantly shaped by three domains and their interconnections: policy, legislative, institutional frameworks and reform agendas; organisation, coherency and types of national social provision sectors; and professionalism, professional orientations and practice, and frontline service delivery interactions.
The second presentation empirically examine the degree of adoption at national, service and professional levels of the evidence-based (EBP) approach in a sample of 18 countries, which were classified in three levels: Initial, included those countries that had adequate national legislation and international recommendations of children rights; Medium, including consensual use of EBP guidelines, official national recognition of professional EBP use and bilateral policy-research-professional collaborations; and Advanced, including regular evaluation of professional work in services, official EBP recognition of professional teams in services and trilateral policy-research-professional collaborations.
The third presentation summarizes the rationale, the contextual, and the methodological challenges to consolidate evaluation strategies in evidence-based family and parenting support interventions. From a narrative review of literature and trough a critical analysis of evidence, if first accounts on the advances in evidence-based practices and services, and therefore discusses the concept of evidence as empirical data and useful information issued in the mist of planned evaluation designs. Illustrative of the dialogical perspective, evidence is to be addressed upon a methodological pluralism roadmap. The presentation concludes outlining the range of evaluation designs, methodological possibilities and their implications for policy, research and practice.
The fourth presentation attempts to conceptualize the workforce skills for the practice of family and parenting support. From a content analysis of international organizations' websites about skills in family support, a systematic review of periodic literature and a review of professional handbooks, family support workforce skills are generally familiar, but not defined nor specified and differentiated from other skills used in the broad field of work with families, and the boundaries between family and parenting support are blurred. In order to reach a reliable consensus, the Delphi method was used and opens up new possibilities for more precise definitions and transferability of family support workforce skills.