Family Support Program Evaluation
Family Support Program Evaluation
Client: Queensland Government
The Family Support Program (FSP) is intended to support families caring for someone with a disability, at home, empowering families and helping them stay together and in touch with their local communities. Disability Services Queensland (DSQ) has funded the FSP since 2000 and as part of the ongoing accountability processes the FSP was subject to an evaluation in 2007/08. The purpose of the evaluation was to identify and confirm best practice model(s) for service delivery and optimum outcomes for participating families. The findings identified areas for further improvement, taking into account the changing context within which the Program operates. An important further consideration of the evaluation was to determine how the findings could be optimally disseminated, to facilitate sharing of the results and to encourage use of the data collected and recommendations.
The evaluation team needed to engage with families and as a consequence sought ethics approval to undertake this activity. Other processes followed in the conduct of the evaluation included – sampling framework design, conduct of a situation analysis, development of relevant surveys, conduct of face to face interviews, etc. Analysis of qualitative data was based on grounded theory. A range of quantitative tools, including rudimentary statistical analyses were conducted on the numerical data made available to the evaluation team from the FSP.