Literature Review on Volunteer Home Visiting
Project Status
Completed
Chief Investigators
Lynn Kemp
Other Team Members
Fiona Byrne
Rationale
Home visiting as a delivery model for early childhood services has proliferated over the past two decades. Volunteer Home Visiting is one of a range of service models aimed at improving the health and well-being of families with young children aged 0-8 years. The review conducted by Black and Kemp in 2004 showed that volunteer home visiting programs vary in their clients, content, duration and outcomes. As a consequence of this variety in practice and outcomes, and a shortage at that time of well-designed quantitative studies evaluating the impacts and outcomes of volunteer home visiting, further review of the evidence is needed to identify reasonable objectives of and service specifications for the volunteer home visiting service models implemented by Families NSW.
Aims
This review of the literature relating to volunteer home visiting will:
- Undertake a comprehensive search of the Australian and internal research literature on volunteer home visiting.
- Assess the level and quality of the research evidence.
- Synthesise the major findings and draw conclusions from the evidence.
- Identify factors that impact on the outcomes achieved by volunteer home visiting services as concluded from the research evidence.
- Identify reasonable objectives of a volunteer home visiting service as concluded from the research evidence.
Design and Method
The method to be used will be that of an integrative review. Integrative reviews summarise past research and examine relationships between concepts of interest. Overall conclusions can then be drawn from the body of literature on a particular topic. The literature included in an integrative review may be broad. In this review, all quantitative and qualitative studies evaluating volunteer home visiting programs will be included.
