Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Cohort five - 2020

Title: Fostering Inter-Disciplinary Research-Practice Partnerships to Enhance Father’s Capacities to Promote Child Well-being Abstract: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJ) Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program aims to develop a generation of leaders from different disciplines who are committed to ensuring everyone has an opportunity to achieve well-being. To that end, a faculty member from the UK College of Social Work and the College of Public Health will team up with the director of The Fatherhood Initiative (FI), a program of Lexington Leadership Foundation (LLF), that provides fathers evidence-informed curriculum (“24/7 DAD” and “Inside-Out Dad”) to equip them with the skills, education, and recourses to be responsible fathers. For this project, RWJ will provide UK and LLF with the resources and mentorship to develop and execute a research project that will address the following aims: 1) Examine if the evidence-informed curriculum (a) increase fathers’ skills and knowledge to promote their children’s physical, educational, health/mental health, social/emotional, and spiritual well-being, and (b) increase their knowledge of positive parenting practices, and (c) facilitate positive father-child interactions. 2) Determine if/how the curriculum needs to be adapted to better equip fathers of children involved in the child welfare system with the capacity to achieve intended outcomes. 3) Acknowledging child welfare workers will need to endorse or “buy” into the programming, illuminate their perceptions of the adapted model and effective strategies for engaging fathers. Pre-post surveys will be administered to fathers to assess if the curriculum achieves intended outcomes. One-on-one interviews with fathers who complete the curricula will be conducted to elicit their feedback on what resources and capacities are needed to promote their children’s well-being in all facets, and how the program should be adapted for child welfare involved families. Focus groups will be held with child welfare caseworkers to gain their feedback on the program. Based upon findings, the team will identify and mobilize additional community partners and systems to maximize the capacities for fathers to promote their children’s well- being. The team’s long-term vision is to obtain additional funding to conduct a RCT, in which the adapted curricula is randomly assigned to half of the child welfare agencies across the state of Kentucky.