Strengthening Families Illinois: How Management and Policy Interventions Influence the Quality of Professional-Parent Partnerships in Child Care

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of The Heller School for Social Policy and Management and the Graduate Faculty of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.

Written by Anne Douglass

Family engagement is widely considered a key component of high quality early care and education. While most efforts to improve the quality of family engagement focus on the preparation and training of teachers, recent studies in the health care field suggest that the organizational context is an often neglected yet critical determinant of the quality of client-professional relationships.

This dissertation is a multiple case study of organizational dynamics and their influence on parent-teacher partnerships in four child care programs participating in the Strengthening Families Illinois initiative. This study applies an organizational systems approach and feminist, sociological, and organizational theories of bureaucracy to parent-professional relationships in the child care context. The specific goals of this study are to 1) identify how the Strengthening Families policy initiative in one state influenced changes in child care programs, 2) identify theorized characteristics of conventional and relational bureaucratic child care organizations, and 3) test the hypothesis that these distinct organizational types influence the quality of professional-parent partnerships.

Data sources include interviews with 60 child care program staff, 20 hours of observation at each program, and program documents. Qualitative analysis techniques include the use of descriptive and interpretive coding, cross case comparisons, and a pattern matching technique in which a theoretically derived pattern of organizational characteristics was compared to the empirical data. This study takes an in-depth look at organizational systems in the four child care programs. As such, it is not intended to serve as a representative sample of child care programs. Another limitation of this study is that it does not include interviews with parents, and instead relies on observations and program documents as a means of incorporating parent perspectives.

This dissertation consists of three papers, each of which reports on one of the three goals of the study. The first paper provides evidence about how Strengthening Families Illinois (SFI) influenced changes in family partnership practices at child care programs. SFI influenced three types of change: management, service delivery, and beliefs and attitudes. These changes improved the quality of family partnership practices in all four programs studied. Findings suggest that SFI's unique multi-level model of implementation was key to its effectiveness, and may serve as an innovative model for quality improvement and professional development policy. In some cases, lack of cultural competence or negative organizational climate was found to be a barrier to quality improvement, pointing to a need to promote strategies to overcome these barriers.

The second paper explores what theory and research suggest about the potential of child care program staff to develop partnerships with families. The author presents a multi-disciplinary literature review that reveals how the increasingly bureaucratic context of child care may reinforce a form of professionalism that views caring and collaborative relationships as unprofessional. New theory and research on 'hybrid' bureaucratic approaches show how organizations can preserve and promote caring partnerships with families despite the increasingly bureaucratic world of early care and education. By integrating theories of democratic and/or caring organizational practices from across multiple disciplines, this paper proposes five key dimensions of a relational bureaucracy. The author suggests that effective partnerships with families in formal child care settings may depend on this relational bureaucratic organizational context.

The third paper uses an organizational systems framework to test the theory that conventional bureaucratic organizational systems discourage partnerships with families, whereas relational bureaucratic organizations may be more conducive to partnerships with families. Results partially confirm the theory. Results show that 1) a relational bureaucratic context supported high quality family partnership practices and 2) a conventional bureaucratic context was one, but not the only, factor in low quality family partnership practices.

This study contributes to an increased understanding of the key dimensions of the organizational context that may support family partnership quality. Efforts to improve family partnership quality may be more successful if they include a focus on the degree to which child care programs 1) incorporate a balance of power and expertise within the organization, and 2) develop, support, and value caring and responsive relationships within the organization. Child care quality improvement policies that fail to include, and even emphasize, the organizational context miss a critical target for intervention and potential change.

Committee

• Lorraine Klerman, DrPH, Chair
• Jody Hoffer Gittell, PhD
• Michael Doonan, PhD
• Holly Elissa Bruno, JD
  President, Bruno Duraturo Keynotes and Teambuilding