Developing Quality Standards and Performance Measures for Residential Group Care: Translating Theory to Practice

ABSTRACT

With the increased emphasis on accountability at the federal and state levels, efforts to identify and address issues impacting the quality and effectiveness of residential care programs are needed. Establishing quality practice standards with measurable performance indicators is a useful means for promoting and evaluating the quality of care in residential programs and informing a process of continuous quality improvement. In this article, we describe a state-wide initiative to enhance the quality of residential group care in Florida. Specifically, we describe efforts to establish a set of quality standards for residential programs and to operationalize the standards by developing and piloting an assessment designed to measure the extent to which group home practices align with the standards. In addition to describing steps taken, we highlight important conceptual and practical considerations for translating standards generated from extant research, best practices, and field experts into clearly defined domains and measurable standards that can be meaningfully transported into a complex practice setting. Finally, we discuss lessons learned and recommendations that may guide similar efforts beyond the state of Florida.

KEYWORDS:

• residential group home
• quality standards
• quality standards assessment
• content validity
• internal reliability
• feasibility

Notes

1. The Florida Institute for Child Welfare is a legislatively mandated institute housed at the Florida State University. The mission of the Institute is to facilitate research to inform and support the integration of evidence-supported practices in Florida’s Child Welfare System.

2. Due to time constraints another full expert review was not completed to reassess content validity of the revised items. The revised items were provided to a selected group of consultants and reviewers who provided additional feedback that was incorporated into the items included in the piloted version of the assessment.

3. Work is in progress to develop a scoring system for the GCQSA. Scoring procedures will be finalized through the statewide validation study. Several aspects will be addressed, including which items to retain, item/scale weighting, whether to include standardized scoring, and/or development of interval scores.

4. To conserve space and for the purpose of the present article, a brief description of the GSQSA is provided. The full report including a complete description of the pilot version of GCQSA is available from the first author upon request. Project briefs can be accessed at the following at Florida Institute for Child Welfare website: https://ficw.fsu.edu/technical-assistance-training/quality-standards-residential-group-care.

5. The Professional and Competent Staff scale was subsequently removed from the revised Youth Form due to prevailing views that youth would not likely have sufficient knowledge needed to provide an informed rating of the standards within those domains.

Additional information

Funding

Portions of the project were funded by the Florida Institute for Child Welfare (grant number 036331).