Effectiveness conditions in residential care for children and adolescents: results from an Italian study

Just like any other intervention in a social and clinical setting, even those based on the out-of-home placement of children need to identify increasingly shared instruments of assessment, able to meet both the external demands of social recognition, transparency and visibility, and the internal need of an evaluation of the efficacy of the work itself. With this aim, the authors have in recent years developed a search program aimed to: a) describe residential care in the Italian contexts; b) clarify conditions under which programs do and do not work; c) identify indicators that can be employed in the quality evaluation of residential care. The study is based on the theoretical framework of developmental psychopathology and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory (1979). The authors will present a selection of results obtained from the two main steps of the study: 1. Questionnaire were distributed in 8 Italian Region to workers from 80 children’s homes (educational and family structured) and to their 45 referring institutions for a total of 570 participants. The research topics refers to the macro-, eso- and meso-system. 2. Questionnaire to 80 educators and 59 adolescents in residential care for at least one year were distributed in 19 children’s homes of 3 Italian Region. Topics refers to the evaluation of the micro-system and the processes of change activated in the adolescents. For each of the four ecological levels it was possible to define criteria of quality that took in consideration the points of view of the different subjects involved in residential care.