Researchers at New York City’s foster care agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, are working on a way to evaluate preventive services—supports offered to struggling families, such as family therapy, parenting classes and job training.

One part of the evaluation will be feedback from parents on their experiences getting help. Caterina Pisciotta, associate staff analyst, has worked with parents who were involved with the system to help her come up with the right questions to ask. Here she describes how feedback from parents shapes her work:

We wanted to know from parents what they thought of the services they got. Were they good or bad? Did they get what they needed? Did they want something different? It’s been interesting learning how parents feel about services.

Every story is different, every parent needs different things. But the core of what I’ve heard is that when you go to an agency for help—it doesn’t matter how you got there, whether you were referred or came on your own—you need to be treated decently and respectfully, you need to feel the agency cares about you and wants what’s best for you, and you need the help you came for.

‘We Need Your Input’

People tend to think you make up questionnaires just based on what you think is important in your own brain, but the quality of the questions you ask determines the helpfulness of the feedback you’ll get. We wanted to get parents involved so we’d be sure that our questions captured their experiences.

We met with a group of parents and told them, “We need your input. You’re the ones with experience with agencies and with workers on a day-to-day basis.” We let them know that our partnership would be an ongoing process. First we’d ask about their experiences, then we’d look at the themes to see what they felt was important, then we’d come up with questions to use with other parents, and then we’d have them take a look at the questionnaire to see if we captured the important aspects of their experiences.

A Way to Do Good

The parents were so heartfelt in sharing their stories, so honest and open. All of the stories were incredibly sad and emotional. The parents didn’t participate because they wanted to rip on the system. They were really looking to change the system. If they had a bad experience, they said, ‘I don’t want this to happen to others,’ and if they had a good experience, they said, ‘I hope this will help the system do more good.’