ABSTRACT
The process by which the Trieschman Carolinas project instrument (TCPI) was completed involved a personal visit to each participating agency by the Carolinas based project co-ordinator. The observed indicators are labelled tangible services, education and support, counselling and therapy, maintenance of parent-child connections, parental decision making, value positions and outcome expectations. The instrument to measure family centred group care (FCGC) practice included measures of three latent variables, service availability, parental involvement and staff attitudes and expectations. As the TCPI data set contains no individual identifying data, the confidentiality of individual respondents was maintained. The FCGC result obtained for each agency program was then subjected to a number of computations. Firstly, each of the four scales that make up the validated FCGC instrument was separately summed. Secondly, each of the summed scale scores was converted into a mean percentage score. Finally, a total summed scale score was generated for each agency as is a total mean percentage scale score.
