This Handbook provides an accessible resource for all social work students, educators, practitioners, and policymakers to increase their knowledge and understanding of how research into the diversity and impact of child and family social work interventions might underpin and drive policy and practice.

Divided into six sections

The Context of Child and Family Social Work Research

Preventive and Reparative Responses to Children and Families

Child Maltreatment: Causes, Consequences, and Responses

Alternate Care as an Approach to Safeguarding Children and Young People

Intervention: Therapeutic Responses to Vulnerable Children, Youth, and Families

Child and Family Social Work in the Global Context

and comprising 52 newly written chapters by experts in the field, it provides a foundational overview of the field of child and family social work, including defining concepts, sentinel historical milestones, and the scope of practice. It also identifies developments in auxiliary fields such as neuroscience, psychology, education, health, poverty, and media

By illustrating diverse research endeavours in parenting, maltreatment, prevention, child protection, and substitutive interventions including foster care, residential care, adoption, and juvenile corrections and elaborating child welfare research methods, measures, and impacts on practice, it analyses evidence-based interventions and policies in early intervention, child protection, child placement, adoption, and advocacy.

It will be required reading for anyone working in social work and child protection.