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Engaging hard-to-reach families and children

3. Qualitative methodology

3.1 Local Answers and Invest to Grow
3.2 Communities for Children

3.1 Local Answers and Invest to Grow

The same interview methodology was used for Local Answers and Invest to Grow. Participants were recruited from a list of 30 contacts provided by FaHCSIA. They were each contacted and invited to participate, and short interviews were conducted with the first 20 respondents to reply, including the target number of six Invest to Grow participants.

Participants were asked about the Local Answers or Invest to Grow projects they have been involved with, including their role, what the projects are aiming to achieve and which groups in the community their projects were trying to engage. They were then asked to identify whether there were any people who could be using the service but may not be for any reason, and what the main challenges to engaging these hard-to-reach groups were. Participants were then asked to describe anything the project was doing or thinking of doing to try to engage these groups, how successful these attempts were likely to be, and why. Finally, participants were asked what would help the project to better engage hard-to-reach populations, and to add any other comments about the issues raised in the interview, or anything else deemed relevant that had not been explored in the interview. To minimise pressures on participants, interviews were kept short at under 45 minutes, with most completed in around 20 to 25 minutes. Interview content was then coded thematically. Participants held positions as project officers, coordinators, managers and executive officers with responsibility for projects receiving Local Answers or Invest to Grow funding. Types of projects included:

Table 1 contains a list of the project type, target group and who the participants considered hard-to-reach.

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3.2 Communities for Children

Interview methodology differed for Communities for Children. Rather than conducting interviews specifically about experiences of reach and engagement as for Local Answers and Invest to Grow, questions about hard-to-reach groups were included in the interview schedule used for the second round of fieldwork in a selection of Communities for Children sites as part of the national evaluation’s Service Coordination Study (Purcal et al. 2009). Questions about the experience of engaging hard-to-reach populations were embedded in a broader set of questions asked to key informants from the network of services in Communities for Children sites. This involved 120 interviews undertaken in late 2007, in the 10 Stronger Families in Australia intensive fieldwork sites.

Differences between the methodology used in Communities for Children compared with Invest to Grow and Local Answers reflect differences in the program and evaluation models. Because Communities for Children is set up to effect change throughout service networks, program participants in this research came from a range of perspectives within the community and service networks, including project managers in Facilitating Partners, Communities for Children committee members, community partners and service providers, community members and government representatives including the FaHCSIA state and territory officers responsible for the sites. In contrast, participants from Local Answers and Invest to Grow were project officers, coordinators and managers involved in projects, with direct experience of implementation and frontline engagement of funded projects. However, many common issues arose in each of the SFCS strands.

As similar issues arose for each strand of SFCS 2004–2009, we have described these together, but have also highlighted specific issues for each of the strands when they arose. At the end of the report, we summarise the findings about whether the Communities for Children model in particular facilitated engagement with hard-to-reach groups, based on analysis of SFIA (see Section 8).

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