3-year developmental trajectories of behavioral well-being in adolescents and care staff residing in residential care homes

Abstract

Introduction: Young residents in child care homes are prone to psychological distress out of their complex background in their original families and are in need of intensive counseling service. Social workers in the care homes are often preoccupied with enormous workloads to work with the residents for in-depth emotional issues. Under the existing service, residents have to wait for a long time to see a clinical psychologist. We examines the efficacy of adding a counselor post in foster care home setting on the residents and existing staff in Hong Kong. Research Design: This longitudinal study was conducted in collaboration with four local NGOs in Hong Kong from 2016 to 2019. A total of 113 social workers and 381 residents aged from 5 to 18 were recruited in the residential care homes from the NGOs. The four counselors hired in the NGOs provided continuous individual counseling sessions for counselees who completed the Counselor Rating Form before and after counseling. Assessments were performed on the residents' behavioral problems via their superintendents and levels of burnout and role ambiguity/conflicts via validated measurement scales. Latent growth modeling evaluated the temporal changes in the variables. Results: The counselees reported a significant increase (d = 0.51, p < 0.01) in counselor rating. Residential care workers displayed overall stable trends in role ambiguity/conflict and burnout during the study period with significant interindividual variations in temporal changes. Controlling for baseline, changes in role ambiguity/conflicts significantly and positively predicted changes in work burnout (f3 = 0.26 - 0.45,p < 0.01) and client burnout (f3 = 0.30 - 0.42, p < 0.01). The residents displayed piecewise decreasing trajectories in internalizing, externalizing, and total problems across the ten assessment waves, with substantial declines over the first 9 months. Conclusions: The current findings suggest that the counseling service could have a beneficial effect in reducing the counselees'emotional and behavioral problems and ameliorating social workers'levels of burnout over time. Future studies are needed to evaluate the linkage between temporal changes in staff burnout and counselees'behavioral problems.