ABSTRACT
This book does not claim to be exhaustive because it is difficult to offer such a thing on such a vast and complex topic, but great effort has been made to at least try. It is based on a large-scale three-year study, conducted as part of a Postdoctoral Fellowship between 2007 and 2010, on culturally appropriate service delivery with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) children and families in the New South Wales (NSW) child protection system in Australia. It was comprised of three stages: (i) a literature review, (ii) 120 case file reviews and (iii) 46 interviews. The study was co-funded by the state’s child protection authority – the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS), then known as the Department of Community Services (DoCS) – and the Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). This chapter summarises the three stages of the study’s methodology,1 which were primarily qualitative but with some triangulation of quantitative methodologies.
