نظریه برنامه و مدل منطق برای رسیدگی به وقوع خشونت خانگی و بدرفتاری با کودک

Social work and child welfare practitioners have long confronted the reality that child maltreatment and domestic violence often coexist within families. However, services for the victims of these types of family violence have been fragmented, forcing victims to go to multiple agencies for assistance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the program theory and logic model developed to guide evaluation of the St. Louis County Greenbook Collaboration to Address Domestic Violence & Child Maltreatment, together with an assessment of the use of this approach as applied to a comprehensive community initiative. Both the program theory guiding the collaboration and the logic model developed from the program theory are described. Data are drawn from qualitative documents produced in conjunction with collaboration participants. The findings suggest that a program theory and logic model approach to program planning is difficult to develop with large collaborations. Such methods may not be useful to program stakeholders. Further, attempting to use a graphic to portray a program may do a disservice to the complex ways in which many of the strategies and outcomes overlap in a community-wide collaboration.

Social work and child welfare practitioners have long confronted the reality that child maltreatment (CM) and domestic violence (DV) often coexist within families. However, services for the victims of these types of family violence have been fragmented, forcing victims to go to multiple agencies for assistance. In 1998, the National Council of Juvenile & Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) began to discuss more effective means for communities to respond to families in which domestic violence and child maltreatment overlap, and published Effective Intervention in Domestic Violence & Child Maltreatment Cases: Guidelines for Policy and Practice ( Schechter & Edleson, 1999). Commonly known as the Greenbook, due to its green cover, the recommendations provide a framework for communities to develop interventions and measure progress as they seek to improve their responses to families experiencing domestic violence and child maltreatment. Shortly after the publication of the Greenbook, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services joined together to fund a national demonstration project to implement the recommendations. Proposals were solicited nationwide from communities hoping to bring about system changes outlined in the Greenbook. In 2001, the Family Court of St. Louis County, MO, received grant funding as one of six demonstration sites to implement the St. Louis County Greenbook Initiative to Address Domestic Violence & Child Maltreatment (referred to herein as “the Initiative”). The three primary partners in the Initiative were the Family Court of St. Louis County; Missouri Department of Social Services-Children's Division (DSS-CD); and the over 25 St. Louis area domestic violence service providers, including batterer intervention programs (BIPs).1 The purpose of this paper is to describe the program theory and logic model developed to guide evaluation of the St. Louis County Initiative, together with an assessment of the use of this approach as applied to a community collaboration. As a community-based initiative with multiple partners, the Initiative can be considered part of the comprehensive community initiative (CCI) movement (Kubisch, Weiss, Schorr, & Connell, 1995). This paper adds to the literature on evaluation of CCIs by describing a program theory and logic model specifically applied to the co-occurrence of domestic violence2 and child maltreatment. It is hoped this paper will facilitate program development and evaluation in other communities attempting to offer coordinated services for victims of child maltreatment and DV, and also be of interest to evaluators of CCIs addressing other social services issues.

The program theory and logic model information presented in this paper is intended as a guide to help both program planners and evaluators. The logic model format is often a new way of looking at program planning for program developers. As such, this approach can force planners to answer key questions related to a succinct identification of the problem they wish to address, the assumptions behind the strategies and activities they propose to implement, how they wish the problem to look at the end of the program in terms of short-term outcomes and long-term impacts, and the resources needed to produce these outcomes. However, individuals come to community collaborations with their own philosophies and system concerns. Our findings are consistent with previous findings that, unless the method is presented at the inception or very early in the collaboration, the complexities of developing a program theory and logic model may not be appropriate for newly forming collaborations.