Creating Pathways to Prevention:What we are learning from the Pathways database

and from the CREATE model of community prevention

Ross Homel, Kate Freiberg & Sara BranchGriffith Criminology Institute

Research Symposium in Honour of Jacqueline Goodnow

Macquarie University, 23 July 2015

Acting early

before problems

emerge or become

entrenched

N > 6000 childrenAttending 7 schools over 10 year period

5

48

49

50

51

52

53

0

10

20

30

40

2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014

CA W

ellbeing

factor

means

RBRI

Total

means

Year

RBRI and Clowning Around

RBRI, SomePW

RBRI, NoPW

Wellbeing, SomePW

Wellbeing, NoPW

0

10

20

30

40

2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014

Average Pe

rcen

les

Year

Progressive Achievement Test

SomePW

NoPW

How did pathways changethrough the primary school years?

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Builds on: the Pathways to Prevention report and 10-year project in

Brisbane the lessons from Communities That Care in the US The repositories of proven and promising evidence-based

programs (e.g., Blueprints for Positive Youth Development)

Works through community coalitions in disadvantaged areas

Fuses the traditions of community-centred and research-to-practice models of community mobilization

Aims to be evidence-based, sustainable, and able to be delivered on a large-scale within the Australian funding and social services context

• Actions in one setting (e.g., schools) interact with, complement, and reinforce actions in other settings (e.g., home).

• More generally, all parts of a child’s developmental system must be in harmonious, mutually reinforcing relationship to promote positive child outcomes:

• The focus of all interventions is to build such mutually reinforcing system relations

The Pathways to Prevention Model:A Developmental Systems Approach

One of the most widely implemented responses to the needs of disadvantaged communities is to provide family support, particularly through NGOs

There is a lack of quantitative knowledge about the effects of family support and child services delivered routinely in schools or the community

Families Children

Communityservices Schools

COMMUNITYCAPACITY

Headofficepolicies,culture&structures

The Focus of Pathways to Prevention

• 1,467 children (aged 4-12)• attending one of 7 local primary

schools• From 1,077 distinct families

30% of all enrolled children participated over the ten years (mostly with a parent)

Ethnic Background % ChildrenFirst Nations 16.3Anglo Australian 26.8Vietnamese 25.5Pacific Island Groups 15.3Other 16.1

Average number of contacts families have with service = 61

Average number of service elements used by families = 3.47

Most frequently used elements are CarerIndividual Support; Advocacy; Playgroup

Average duration of family participation =1.47 years (76 weeks)

Extent of family participation across service elements is related to family adversity / number of stressors experienced by family (r = .44, p <.05)

What patterns, duration and intensity of program participation for families or children facing a given

level of adversity of a given age or cultural group

produce what kinds of outcomes for children or parents?

Parent Empowerment and Efficacy Measure

PEEM Validated Measure20 items (10‐point scale)Taps: Efficacy to Parent Efficacy to Connect 

Kate Freiberg one a prize in 2015 from the Australian Association of Social Workers for this new measure

Parent Efficacy

Parent Efficacy linked to baseline Adversity (r =-.31 p<.001)

• Family Support increases parent efficacy (effect size .36)

142144146148150152154156158160

Pretest Post‐test

Effect of Pathways on Parent Efficacy (PEEM) 

Effect Size .36(F (1,173)= 21.41, p<.001)

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Validated Tool:

Child self-report

Age appropriate format (video game)

Quick, convenient, easy to use

Not disruptive of routine practice

Low literacy requirements

Multi-dimensional - tap key domains relevant to age group (5-12 years) 18

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A pathway to prevention tested empirically

Matched control groups created from non-Pathways children

using precision matching (or propensity score matching) on such variables as:

age, gender, ethnicity, behaviour, wellbeing, academic performance

and especially a baseline measure of the dependent variable (or surrogate)

Poor behaviour Grade 1 performance

Effect of program participation on preschoolchildren's level of difficult behaviour

20

22

24

26

28

30

32

None FIP Only PIP Only FIP + PIP

Program Group

RBRI Score

Effect size = 0.58; p=0.003

More than 5 contactsproduce no significantfurther improvement

Effect size = 1.6;p < 0.001

N = 174 parents from larger sample;Pathways and non-Pathways groups not matched

Note: Adjusted coefficients, multivariate multilevel model

p < 0.05 for both factors;Effect sizes = 0.71 & 0.59

Innovation without capacityis of limited value…

Works entirely within the Australian Government’s Communities for Children Program as an effective and enduring vehicle for the delivery of child and family services (children 0-12 years in disadvantaged areas)

The focus in this stage is on strengthening the capacity of the child serving system in CfC communities rather than on actually implementing evidence-based programs and evaluating their impact on child wellbeing.

Critically, a central objective is to make such an advance possible in CfC and other disadvantaged areas across Australia in the second, IMPLEMENTATION STAGE (2017-2021).

Build and test a set of structured processes and resources

-called a Prevention Support System

-to strengthen Communities for Children, which is Australia’s best Prevention Delivery System for disadvantaged children

Project Partners

Five ‘capacity building’ CfC communities in NSW (3) and Queensland (2)

Five comparison or ‘business as usual’ CfC communities (3 in NSW, 2 in Qld)

Outcome variable: Baseline and post-intervention measures of community partnership/coalition functioning (2-year duration)

Supported by economic analyses of efficiency of delivery

1. An interactive web-based set of electronic resources: Training tools for CfC teachers and community workers,

videos, games, evaluation tools for measuring community coalition function;

child & family outcomes; economic analysis data sharing management system (the DSS Data Exchange

system)

2. Systems and processes established by collective impact facilitators for: implementing the CREATE community prevention

model achieving the core conditions of collective impact

NB: Collective impact facilitators are employed by the grant not by DSS or facilitating partners

Department of Social ServicesData Exchange System

Resolve

Conflic

Implement the Prevention Support System in new CfC communities

Use an experimental design in at least 12 capacity building communities and 12 basic implementation communities – or use a randomised time of rollout of 52 communities

Thus STAGING the rollout of these new systems and resources in a manner that allows a rigorous test of their effectiveness and economic benefit

Include a detailed qualitative component focused on context, processes and outcomes in a sample of communities

The evolving Pathways to Prevention work has been supported since 1999 by the Australian Research Council

We are also grateful to the Australian Institute of Criminology for providing some funds to analyse the sample of children who have been followed from preschool to Grade 7/8

We are grateful to our partners Mission Australia and Education Queensland

Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the many parents and children who made all this work possible

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Creating Pathways to Prevention:

http://bit.ly/creating_pathways_to_prevention