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Practitioners' evaluations of Theraplay as an effective tool in serving foster and adopted children and their families

Several studies have shown that foster and adopted children have high risk of developing severe mental health problems (Blome & Steib, 2004; Golden, 2009; Leslie, Hurlburt, Landsverk, Barth, & Slyman, 2004; McMillen. Scott, Zima, Ollie, Munson, & Spitznagel, 2004). On the other hand, evidence-based models are limited and less accessible for practitioners working with foster and adopted children (Dorsey, Kerns, Trupin, Conover, & Berliner, 2012). The goal for this study is to explore the practitioners’ evaluations of Theraplay®, which is a relationship based model for meeting the pervasive clinical needs of foster and adopted children and their families. Exploring Theraplay in the social work field is meaningful because of its popularity among social workers and the substantial number of clients successfully treated with Theraplay. With Theraplay, attachment theory and neuroscience are applied to understand the necessity of attachment-based models in meeting the needs of foster and adopted children. A mixed-method research design was selected for this study. It best answered the study’s research questions with higher response rates and provided an in-depth exploration in this study (Groves, Fowler, Couper, Lepkowski, Singer, & Tourangeau, 2004). The survey data (N=87) were collected at the 6 International Theraplay Conference on July11-July 12, 2013 in Evanston, IL. The survey included a demographic questionnaire, which presented questions about the extent of their evaluations of Theraplay, the use of Theraplay in practice, and the Theraplay competency assessment