An assessment of foster parents with respect to their adequacy and satisfaction

Eddy, Irene Mary (1978) An assessment of foster parents with respect to their adequacy and satisfaction. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Foster family care is one of society's responses to the need for temporary or long term care of children whose parents are unable or unwilling to provide them nurturance and safety. Child welfare agencies have been given sanction by society to recruit, select, develop and supervise foster homes. However, their success in these areas has been uneven. -- According to the foster care literature, there is a chronic shortage of adequate foster parents in Canada and the United States. Many foster parents are dissatisfied with fostering even though they have been designated as adequate by child welfare agencies. So that there might be a better understanding of the satisfactions derived from fostering this study was undertaken. -- The purpose of the study was to seek answers to the questions: (1) Is there a significant relationship between foster parents' satisfactions with fostering and social workers' ratings of adequacy of foster parents? (2) Are certain demographic characteristics of foster parents related to foster parents' adequacy and/or satisfaction. -- Answers to these questions would shed some light on just who are the most adequate and most satisfied foster parents. In addition, since closure of foster homes is more often due to voluntary withdrawal than to agency rejection, identification of predictors of foster parents' satisfaction would be a useful finding. -- The study group consisted of foster parents from eighty-two foster homes which are listed as "regular" foster homes by the Department of Social Services for the area serviced by their St. John's office. -- An interview schedule was used to collect the data regarding the foster parents. Because of time and financial constraints the study group was confined to the total population of foster parents in St. John's and surrounding area. -- The social workers at the St. John's service office of the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Social Services divided the study group into more adequate and less adequate foster parents using the Foster Parents' Global Adequacy Scale developed for this research. The degree of satisfaction of foster parents was determined by a Foster Parents' Satisfaction Scale based on prior work by Fanshel (1966) in the United States. The interview schedule also contained a demographic questionnaire. -- From this process, it was found that foster parents rated as more adequate by the social workers were also the more satisfied foster parents. It was also found that certain foster parents' demographic characteristics, i.e., foster mother's age and education of foster parents, were positively related to adequacy and satisfactions of foster parents.

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