How to Foster Engagement in Child and Family Service Systems using Sociocultural Responsive Frameworks for Families at Higher Risk for Social Exclusion

Family engagement in child and family service systems can be influenced by the quality of the relationship between service system, provider, and family. Knowledge surrounding how relationships are mechanisms through which family engagement can be enhanced to promote equity in service accessibility remains scant, as such family engagement continues to be studied as a family-centric behavior and attitudinal construct. Thus, limited attention has been given to exploring structural factors influencing family engagement. In response and drawing from the socio-ecological model, this dissertation combines two qualitative studies to discuss the importance of and mechanisms for building relationships in two different contexts. The first study, “Factors Influencing Family Engagement for Immigrant Latina Mothers Participating in Trauma-Informed Child and Family Behavioral Health Services”, explores qualitatively the in-depth experiences of immigrant Latina mothers in trauma-informed services to understand multilevel factors and patterns of interconnection between these factors in the social ecology that impede or foster engagement in such services. Culturally responsive strategies to trauma-informed behavioral health services employed by providers and service agencies that lower immigrant Latina mothers’ barriers are also discussed. The second paper, “Sociocultural Responsive Frameworks to Increase Family Engagement in Child Serving Systems through a Peer-to-Peer Model for Families Experiencing Trauma”, uses multimodal qualitative methodology to comprehensively examine the value of a peer-to-peer support model in the context of trauma-informed and culturally responsive approaches in order to enhance family engagement for communities at higher risk for social exclusion. Together, these studies will shed light on the importance of studying family engagement as a function of intertwined structural factors and capitalizing on meaningful relationships to overcome barriers to community-based service engagement to address health disparities.