A qualitative evaluation of a preventive intervention for parents: The “Groups for Family Enrichment”

The traditional objective of parental enrichment programs is to train parents’ abilities and specific competences, but these interventions pay less attention to the key aspect of parental identity. Parenting programs, moreover, are generally delivered to groups of parents, but scarce attention has been devoted to the use of the group as a specific tool of the intervention and as a factor promoting changes in participants’ relational functioning. The Groups for Family Enrichment (GFE; Iafrate & Rosnati, 2007, Iafrate, Donato & Bertoni, 2010), focus on parental identity in addition to parental skills and adopt a semistructured format to take advantage of the group setting. We will first introduce the characteristics of GFE, then we will describe an application of this intervention to a group of Italian parents, and finally we will present the results of a qualitative evaluation of such an intervention. Findings from process evaluation showed that participants actively contributed to the development of themes during the intervention. Result evaluation showed that recognition of key aspects of parental identity can be an important prerequisite to the acquisition of better parenting skills. Implications for parenting programs design are discussed.