THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CHILD AND FAMILY SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH KNOWLEDGE BUILDING APPLICATION AND IMPACT (HB 2025)

This Handbook provides an accessible resource for all social work students, educators, practitioners, and policymakers to increase their knowledge and understanding of how research into the diversity and impact of child and family social work interventions might underpin and drive policy and practice.

Divided into six sections

• The Context of Child and Family Social Work Research
• Preventive and Reparative Responses to Children and Families
• Child Maltreatment: Causes, Consequences, and Responses
• Alternate Care as an Approach to Safeguarding Children and Young People
• Intervention: Therapeutic Responses to Vulnerable Children, Youth, and Families
• Child and Family Social Work in the Global Context

and comprising 52 newly written chapters by experts in the field, it provides a foundational overview of the field of child and family social work, including defining concepts, sentinel historical milestones, and the scope of practice. It also identifies developments in auxiliary fields such as neuroscience, psychology, education, health, poverty, and media

By illustrating diverse research endeavours in parenting, maltreatment, prevention, child protection, and substitutive interventions including foster care, residential care, adoption, and juvenile corrections and elaborating child welfare research methods, measures, and impacts on practice, it analyses evidence-based interventions and policies in early intervention, child protection, child placement, adoption, and advocacy.

It will be required reading for anyone working in social work and child protection.

Elizabeth Fernandez, AM, PhD, MA, is Professor of Social Work, School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australia.

Penelope Welbourne is Associate Professor of Social Work at Plymouth University.

Bethany Lee, PhD, MSW, is the Richard P. Barth Professor of Children’s Services at the University of Maryland School of Social Work.

Joyce L. C. Ma is Emeritus Professor, Department of Social Work at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.