Family-Professional Partnerships in Action during the Implementation of a Child-Focused Intervention

Abstract

This qualitative study explores and identifies observable behaviors and interactions of family-professional partnerships in action formed during the implementation of the Foundations Intervention. The Foundations Intervention is an intervention requiring families and professionals to engage in a mutual task of identifying a child’s needs for change, selecting strategies to work on at both home and school environments, and then to reflect jointly on how well those strategies worked. The question for this study was to examine the observable interactions of the families and professionals as they worked together, to identify observable components of effective partnership. This study was an analysis of transcribed videotapes and other qualitative data gathered for 10 family-professional dyads who were engaging in the Foundations Intervention. The analysis involved coding the data using an initial framework developed by previous researchers on components of partnerships based on participants’ retrospective perspectives and insights about partnership. The goal was to identify components of partnership that are readily observable and evident in real time and within the relatively short time-frame of the Foundations Intervention, i.e., Partnerships in Action. The study results yielded a framework for Partnerships in Action, including four primary domains: communication, skills, equality, and collaboration. Within each of these domains, I also identified and defined a series of indicators. The Partnerships in Action framework is a first step toward development of a functional tool to measure more objective behaviors and to provide guidance toward promoting better family-professional partnerships across home and school environments.