Exploring home visitation as an intervention for child abuse and neglect: is worker-parent alliance predictive of maternal outcomes?

Home visitation programs are growing in popularity for a variety of social concerns including early childhood abuse and neglect. Healthy Families Arizona (HFAz) uses the home visitation format to deliver early-childhood development and parenting skills for at-risk parents with the goal of decreasing incidents of child abuse and neglect (Daro & Harding, 1999). Some research demonstrates that the strength of the worker’s alliance with parents can be significantly predictive of home visitation program completion and decreases in depression for participating mothers, but these findings have little replication (Girvin, DePanfilis, & Daining, 2007). It is important to have a clear understanding of worker-client alliance and how it affects maternal outcomes including program retention and completion so that those working with home visitation interventions can implement programs from an evidence-based perspective, thus increasing efficiency and efficacy of programs.

This study hypothesizes a significant relationship exists between Working Alliance Inventory (WAI) scores and Healthy Families Parenting Inventory scores, and that WAI scores predict maternal outcomes from the HFPI. Bivariate correlation analysis determined a significant positive relationship exists between WAI scores and home visitation completion rates (r=0.320, p= .042), and found no other significant relationships. Regression analysis found WAI scores are predictive home visitation completion.