PM2009: Parent Cafes: An Analysis of a Community-based Intervention Amongst Families in Washington, DC

Background: The Parent Café is an intervention designed by Be Strong Families (BSF) to facilitate peer-to-peer learning around five evidence-based protective factors that improve resilience and strengthen supports within families:
Resilience, Relationships, Support, Knowledge and Communication.
Limited data has been published describing the BSF Parent Café model.

Objectives:
Describe characteristics of participants who attended Parent Cafés.
Describe the level of knowledge and satisfaction of the BSF Parent Café model as reported by café participants.

Methods: Study

Design: This is a retrospective review of pre-surveys from four Parent Café’s over September 2020-December 2020 that were planned and led by parents working with the Early Childhood Innovation Network (ECIN).

Recruitment: Caregivers were recruited through referrals from clinicians in a primary care setting and via word-of-mouth by parent participants.

Café Structure: Sessions were virtually conducted for a three-hour period adhering to the fidelity of the Parent Cafe model.

Evaluation: Participants completed pre- and post-surveys including the Connor-Davidson Resiliency Scale (CD-RISC)5, the Protective Factors Survey (PFS)6, and the Be Strong Families Survey. The composite surveys were reviewed and revised with parents prior to this café series.

Analysis: Pre-surveys from participants’ first ECIN Parent Café were analyzed. Descriptive analysis was performed on participant characteristics, PFS subscales, PFS cumulative score, and CD-RISC cumulative score. Cronbach Alphas were calculated on scales and subscales to evaluate internal validity. Open-ended questions from participants’ first Be Strong Families post-survey were coded using direct thematic analysis and review for inter-rater reliability.

Results: See attached.

Conclusion: Preliminary data from the ECIN Parent Cafés showed a range of scores related to the PFS subscales, cumulative scale, and CD-RISC. It is possible that this range is important for cafes to affect change by facilitating discourse among participants at various baselines related to the protective factors. The Cronbach Alphas show that these scales/subscales maintained their validity in this study, indicating that they are effective tools for the evaluation of parent cafes.

Based on our results, Parent Cafes demonstrate a potential as an intervention to establish an intent among participants to incorporate the protective factors into their daily lives and to empower participants’ agency to act on that intent.

Our preliminary findings help to build a strong foundation for future studies around utilizing Parent Cafés as a tool to increase family resilience. Participants provided overwhelmingly positive feedback related to their engagement during cafes, overall sense of connectedness to a community of caregivers, and their intentions to return to future sessions. Further research should be done over a longer study period to explore a potential dose-response relationship between Parent Café attendance and measurable behavior change in respect to the protective factors. This relationship may be modulated by the level of leadership participants choose to have in future cafes they attend.