THE FAMILY RESILIENCE CONSTRUCT

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CHAPTER 3 DESCRIPTION AND APPLICATION OF THE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL WORKERS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE TO STRENGTHEN AND PRESERVE FAMILIES

INTRODUCTION

Policies and legislation within the South African context recognize that all families have inherent capacities and strengths despite risk factors and challenges they have to face. There is also an understanding that family resilience is described as the ability to withstand and rebound from adversities. The White Paper on Families (2013) outlining the policy of services to families, refers to family resilience but gives no direction on how to translate family resilience into practice.
Working in the Directorate: Families in the Department of Social Development and being involved in the development of a policy on families as outlined in the White Paper on Families (2013), I became interested in family resilience. During my Masters study, I conducted research with the topic “Exploring Family Resilience amongst South African Social Work Clients” (Moss 2010).
I came to the conclusion that most social work clients do not know what the term family resilience means, but could clearly illustrate through own life experiences what family resilience is. The social workers involved could also clearly explain what family resilience is, but had difficulty in translating the information into appropriate programmes and services that could foster and sustain family resilience. These findings and my personal interest in family resilience and being tasked to write guidelines on family resilience sparked the idea of developing practice guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience.
In this chapter, I will describe how I did the qualitative research and developed the practice guidelines. I will, in contrast to the other chapters, write this chapter in the first person. Denzin and Lincoln (2000:924) support this practice: “Writing from our selves should strengthen the community of qualitative researchers and the individual voices within it, because we will be more fully present in our work, more honest, more engaged”.
The aim of the study is to develop practice guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience so to answer the research question “How, and by doing what, can social workers foster and sustain family resilience to strengthen and preserve the family”.
The following goals and objectives were formulated for the study:

• The goal of the study is to develop “Practice guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience to strengthen and preserve families”.
• The following are task objectives formulated to guide and monitor the progress of the study:
• Task objective 1: To explore and describe the available documented interventions that aim to strengthen and preserve families and foster and sustain family resilience.
• Task objective 2: To explore and describe social workers’ understanding of family resilience.
• Task objective 3:To explore and describe social workers’ experiences of interventions that foster and sustain family resilience.
• Task objective 4:To explore and describe social workers’ suggestions on interventions to foster and sustain family resilience.
• Task objective 5: To develop draft practice guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience.
• Task objective 6:To pilot the draft practice guidelines during a national consultative workshop through the Department of Social Development to finalise the guidelines.

The development of practice Guidelines steered towards applied research. Applied research as defined by Fouché and De Vos (2011:94) is most often the “scientific planning of induced change in a troublesome situation” and pointed towards using intervention research.
Through careful consideration, I concluded that the research question of this research would be best answered by conducting qualitative research within the Intervention Design and Development (IDD) model of Rothman and Thomas (1994).
Chapter 1 provided detail on the proposed research method, data verification and ethical guidelines. This chapter, chapter 3, provides a “thick” and comprehensive description of the research methods used, as the value worth of the findings will depend on the validity of the design and data collection procedure. Thick description also leads to thick interpretation (Schurink, Fouché & De Vos 2011; Gelo et al 2008:269; Denzin & Lincoln 2000:391).
Exploring social workers’ understanding and their suggestions on family resilience processes to develop the practice guidelines, a qualitative approach in the intervention research was used. De Vos and Strydom (2011:475) defined intervention research as “studies carried out for the purpose of conceiving, creating and testing innovative human services interventions”. Intervention research also allows for the thick in-depth data description, especially when a qualitative research approach has been followed.

RESEARCH APPROACH: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

As was highlighted in Chapter 1, a qualitative research approach was used in this study.
The notion of multiple realities lies at the heart of qualitative research and it is an inductive process (moving from the particular to the general, from concrete observations to a general theoretical explanation) that entails observing particular people in context and how they view their actions and the world around them. Qualitative approaches proposed a naturalistic, contextual-based and holistic understanding of the human being (Nicholls 2009:586; Gelo et al 2008:268).
I used qualitative research as it provides an opportunity to systematically explore, describe and contextualise the human experience. I later realised that the underlying assumptions and characteristics of the qualitative research approach would also provide me with the opportunity to have a multi-perspective approach to the interaction with social workers through the face-to-face semi-structured interviews, the focus group interviews and the consultative workshop conducted to test the prototype of practice guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience. Qualitative research gave me the opportunity to describe, make sense of, and interpret this interaction in terms of the meanings and the perceptions of the “actors in action” (social workers) on family resilience within a specific context. (Donalek & Soldwisch 2004; Fossey, Harvey, McDermott & Davidson 2002:717; Fouché & Schurink 2011:312; Scott & Xie 2005).
I also took the following features of qualitative research into consideration when deciding to conduct qualitative research, i.e.:

• In qualitative research, the researcher is the research instrument and, therefore, must have the ability to observe and have interviewing skills and the ability to build rapport with the research participants. As a social worker I was able to maintain objectivity and be clear in my role as researcher. I, however, needed to keep in mind that I, coming from a family myself, have an own narrative of family life and needed to be empathetic when establishing how people live and what they are doing (family functions) and how they are doing it (family functioning) as part of everyday life (Denzin & Lincoln 2000:386, 646).
• The phenomenon is ill-defined or not well-understood. Social workers’ understanding of family resilience and their suggestions on implementation were unknown. Qualitative research, therefore, provided an opportunity to gain greater understanding of the nature of social workers’ understanding. The open and generative nature of focus groups and individual interviews allowed for the exploration of social workers’ understanding of family resilience and their suggestions for implementation as the ultimate goal was to develop guidelines for social workers utilising, amongst others, their suggestions to develop family resilience programmes.
• The collection of information from individuals or groups that have a specialised role in society. In this research study information was collected from social workers who have a specialised role in the welfare sector rendering services to families. Their views, sought from the vantage point of their particular positions, were explored by exploratory questioning in focus-group interviews and the face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Furthermore, the research participants used case studies to illustrate their interventions of how they as social workers had fostered and sustained family resilience, even though it had not been their intention to do so in the first instance. The exploratory and descriptive nature of qualitative research provided an opportunity to answer “what” and “how” questions.

Qualitative research enabled me to explore and describe the perceptions and experiences of social workers rendering services to families, as well as the interventions that they could identify, which could enhance family resilience and family well-being. Furthermore, the qualitative approach enabled me to establish social workers’ understanding of family resilience, and explore their experiences of rendering family preservation services (Alson & Bowles 2003:34; Creswell 2003:154; Fouché & De Vos 2011:95; Ritchie & Lewis 2003:27).
Evidently, qualitative research, concerned with the interpretation of subjective meaning, the description of the social context and the privileging of lay knowledge, was the most appropriate research approach to be utilised (Creswell 1998; Fossey, Harvey, McDermott & Davidson 2002:723).

RESEARCH DESIGN

The design used by researchers depends on the purpose of the study, the nature of the research question and the skills and resources available to the researcher (Creswell 2009:14; Fouché & Schurink 2011:312).
The research design can be defined as a set of flexible guidelines and instructions, guided by the research questions that connect theoretical paradigms, firstly, to strategies of inquiry and, secondly, to methods for collecting empirical materials. It was imperative that I developed a strategy of inquiry that would connect me as researcher to specific methods for collecting and analysing empirical material (Denzin & Lincoln 2005:25; Mouton 2009:107).
Formulating a research design is a creative process and thought provoking. The research design had to provide a procedural plan to answer the research question (which flows from the research problem) as validly, objectively and economically as possible. The research design can be described as a “blue print”, referring to a detailed research plan, structure and strategy of investigation to answer the research questions (Creswell 2009:14; Hill 2012). The use of blueprints within qualitative research should be flexible and should have the ability to be changed during the course of the study. Furthermore, different parts of the design may receive differential attention or should even be omitted (Yin 2011:76).
There are differences in how the research goals can be achieved. Rubin and Babbie (2013:50–52) describe the purpose of qualitative research as exploration, description and explanation and evaluation.
The research was undertaken with the purpose of exploring and describing the understanding, experiences and suggestions of social workers on family resilience, as well as interventions to foster and sustain family resilience to be used to develop practice guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience. Therefore, qualitative research with an exploratory, descriptive and contextual purpose and related designs, as well as intervention research, were undertaken.

Exploratory design

As was mentioned in Chapter 2, substantive research has been done on the phenomena family resilience and there seemed to be a clear understanding on what family resilience is and how it should be defined. However, in South Africa a knowledge gap exists in translating family resilience theory into practice. None of the existing family resilience interventions that presently exist, comprehensively and holistically address family resilience. At present there is no attempt to foster and sustain family resilience as an outcome of social welfare services in the South African context. Furthermore, it seems that the understanding of family resilience and its synergetic nature has not as yet been thoroughly introduced to social workers in South Africa. I realised that the lack of knowledge urgently needs to be addressed. The development of guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience to strengthen and preserve families would assist in bridging the identified gap.
As set out in the research questions and the objectives, I wanted to explore how and by doing what, can social workers foster and sustain family resilience to strengthen and preserve families. I, therefore, explored and described how social workers understand family resilience and their experiences and suggestions of interventions that foster and sustain family resilience. The information guided me to develop practice guidelines for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL ORIENTATION TO THE RESEARCH
1.1 INTRODUCTION
1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT AND RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY
1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION
1.4 GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
1.5 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
1.6 THE INTERVENTION DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT (IDD) OF ROTHMAN AND THOMAS
1.7 ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS THAT WILL BE FOLLOWED TO GUIDE THE RESEARCH PROCESS
1.8 CLARIFICATION OF CONCEPTS
1.9 FORMAT OF THE THESIS
CHAPTER 2: THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THIS STUDY
2.1 INTRODUCTION
2.2 THEORETICAL APPROACHES OF SERVICE DELIVERY TO.FAMILIES
2.3 SOCIAL WELFARE SERVICE DELIVERY PRINCIPLES APPLICABLE TO INTERVENTIONS THAT WOULD FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE
2.4 THE FAMILY RESILIENCE CONSTRUCT
2.5 A FAMILY RESILIENCE PROCESS MODEL AS A CHANGE PROCES (HOW FAMILY RESILIENCE OPERATES)
CHAPTER 3: DESCRIPTION AND APPLICATION OF THE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY IN THEDEVELOPMENT OF PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL WORKERS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE TO STRENGTHEN AND PRESERVE FAMILIES
3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.2 RESEARCH APPROACH: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
3.3 RESEARCH DESIGN
4.4 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 5: RESEARCH FINDINGS ON SOCIAL WORKERS’. INPUT ON SOCIAL WORK INTERVENTIONS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE
5.1 INTRODUCTION
5.2 FINDINGS ON SOCIAL WORKERS’ INPUT ON SOCIAL WORK INTERVENTIONS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE TO STRENGTHEN AND PRESERVE FAMILIES
5.3 DISCUSSION OF THEMES
CHAPTER 6: FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS INHERENT IN MODELS AND GUIDELINES AND SUGGESTIONS IN LITERATURE RELATING TO FAMILY RESILIENCE INTERVENTIONS
6.1 INTRODUCTION
6.2 FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS IN SERVICES AND PROGRAMMES THAT HAVE SPECIFIC BEARING ON FAMILIES WITHIN THE SOCIAL WELFARE SECTOR IN SOUTH AFRICA
6.3 FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS IN PROGRAMMES AND MODELS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE
6.4 FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS IN FAMILY RESILIENCE INTERVENTIONS WITH SPECIFIC TARGET GROUPS AND OUTCOMES
6.5 Format layout for “The Guidelines” for social workers to foster and sustain family resilience
6.6. Conclusion
CHAPTER 7: PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL WORKERS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE
7.1 INTRODUCTION
7.2 THE PROTOTYPE “PRACTICE GUIDELINES”
7.3 THE NATIONAL CONSULTATIVE WORKSHOP ON THE PROTOTYPE “PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL WORKERS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE”
7.4 IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL WORKERS TO FOSTER AND SUSTAIN FAMILY RESILIENCE TO STRENGTHEN AND PRESERVE FAMILIES
7.5 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 8: A REVIEW OF THE STUDY: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
8.1 INTRODUCTION
8.2 SUMMARIES AND CONCLUSIONS OF CHAPTER
8.3 RECOMMENDATIONS
8.4 CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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