Since the enactment of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-272) family preservation is of major significance to the child welfare field. As a result, family-centered, home-based services have proliferated as a means of prevention of out-of-home placement and as a means of empowering families to help themselves. This is an exploratory, descriptive study on family-centered, home-based services, involving a secondary analysis of an existing database. Client characteristics are analyzed, and a subsample of high-risk clients is identified, based on a scale of risk of out-of-home placement developed for this research. Client characteristic is operationalized for this study as all contextual variables present in database that are associated with the family, i.e., demographic, history of physical abuse, prior social services and so forth. Client characteristics are drawn from several client domains-psychological, social, environmental-and are not only personal characteristics of the client. The effectiveness of family-centered, home-based services with the low- and high-risk client are examined in relation to four outcome variables. These variables are as follows, placement prevention, family functioning, completion of the program, and improvement in problem areas. The study's findings suggest that family-centered, home-based programs are effective in the prevention of placement for both high- and low-risk clients. The study found a statistically significant difference between pre- and post-family functioning of families who participated in the home-based program. Among the implications of these findings was the assertion that home-based services are effective with the multi-problem family. The use of client characteristics as a measure of risk and potential program success positions this study as a model for continuing research in this area. The findings have significance for not only the child welfare field but also for the profession of social work.
