Meeting with Foster Parent Associations Posted on March 1, 2006 Joe Price (bio) explains how he and his research team gained support from foster parent associations from the beginning.

One of the advantages we had in San Diego is that we've had probably a 15-year relation with child welfare, and that kind of relationship is reciprocal in that we've done studies with the kids within child welfare, but then we feed back information.

The center that I'm involved in, The Child and Adolescent Services Research Center, John Landsverk is the director, and John has had this wonderful relationship with the folks in Child Welfare and Health and Human Services that we've built over the years this reciprocal relationship of them letting us have access and then we give them data that they can use. That groundwork was there when we went in, so when we went in initially to begin this study, we had the support of the director of Child Welfare, and she opened the doors for us to be able to go in.

But what we had to do, and it was really critical, was win the support of the foster parent associations. Those in San Diego are fairly strong organizations that are independent of Child Welfare, and they're really representative of the foster parents. What we did to do that was we had all sorts of meetings with 3 or 4 of the people involved in foster parent associations, who are foster parents themselves. We told them about the project, what we wanted to do.

Probably the hardest sell was randomization into treatment and control, and they were saying, 'Well, you know if it works...' and what we said was, 'You know what? We don't know it works yet, and so that's why we're testing it. We don't want to get a model out there that we don't have evidence for. There's enough parenting stuff out there that doesn't have evidence-base. We want to make sure this works." They said OK, all right, and they were supportive, and that really helped in terms of recruitment from foster parents.

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