ABSTRACT
Our brief and selective review of different types of family centre services in the UK, US and Hong Kong reveals that at a very general level they share some affinity in respect of their broad philosophy and mission to sustain children in families, promote effective parenting and to enhance the level of support to families in the community. This said, it remains evident that generalisations cannot be drawn from these different programmes either within or across countries due to a lack of rigorous evaluation studies and a shortage of good descriptive accounts of practice, and clear definitions over their purpose (Warren 1993). More significantly, the absence of a creditable body of findings around family support services precludes any broad claims of service effectiveness for this type of service apart from the limited evidence within case studies, and these frequently chart user satisfaction over particular services rather than reveal longer term outcomes for specific interventions (see Lloyd 1997, p. 158). Such case studies, as we have presented in some of these chapters, do indeed reveal user approval but this is not the same thing as saying that families or communities benefit in some measurable sense against clear objectives, such as child safety, better parenting capacities, family preservation and so forth. So, it is towards this thorny matter of outcomes and measurement that this final chapter turns, and here we address the question - can the sorts of services described here be assessed and if so, what are the key issues, methods and rationales for such evaluation?
