Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting
Date Submitted: Dec 5, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 10, 2018 - Feb 4, 2019
Date Accepted: Jul 19, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The effectiveness of the Volunteer Family Connect Program in supporting vulnerable families: A randomised controlled trial intention-to-treat analysis of primary outcome variables
ABSTRACT
Background:
Volunteer home visiting is a widely adopted community-based approach to supporting families by linking isolated or vulnerable families with community volunteers. This study seeks to robustly evaluate the effectiveness of this model of support for families with young children.
Objective:
This paper reports the intention-to-treat analysis of primary and secondary outcomes for a pragmatic randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the Volunteer Family Connect intervention, a volunteer home visiting program designed to support families with young children who experience social isolation or a lack of parenting confidence and skills.
Methods:
The RCT was conducted across seven sites in Australia. Overall, 341 families were recruited: 169 intervention (services as usual + volunteer home visiting) and 172 control (services as usual) families. Intervention families received the program for 3-12 months. Participants were invited to complete six data collection points over a 15-month period. Primary outcomes were community connectedness and parenting competence. Secondary outcomes included parent physical and mental health, general parent wellbeing, parent empowerment, the sustainability of family routines, and the parent-child relationship.
Results:
The intervention group demonstrated significant improvement compared to the control group in both of the primary outcomes. They were significantly more like to report improvements in the guidance available to them as measured by the Social Provisions Scale, a key measure of community connectedness and scores on the Parenting Sense of Competence Scale were significantly in favour of the intervention group. Intervention families also reported significantly higher wellbeing, and were significantly more likely to feel that life was improving. A number of positive trends were also evident within the findings.
Conclusions:
The Volunteer Family Connect intervention was considered to be an effective intervention for improving the community connectedness and parenting competence of families with young children. Clinical Trial: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry (Trial ID: ACTRN12616000396426).
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.