Project Director

Cooley, Morgan

Department Examiner

Womack, Bethany; Whitted, Jodi

Department

Dept. of Social Work

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Foster parents are people who are caregivers for children in foster care. Resilience is a trait that is developed by the exposure of stress, and adversity (Cicchetti & Garmezy, 1993). Some foster parents remain resilient and others do not. The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has any impact on foster parents’ resilience, coping, satisfaction, and intent to continue fostering. This study included 114 current foster parents from across the United States. The study at hand found that 59.6% of foster parents experienced one ACEs or more, which is lower than the national average of 70% (Starecheski, 2015). Also there was a significant difference in resilience between foster parents who had ACEs and those who did not have ACEs, but there was no significance in coping, satisfaction, stress, challenges with fostering, intent to continue fostering, and perception of child behaviors. This appears to support the idea that experiences of personal trauma do not weaken a foster parent’s ability to be an adequate foster parent. These findings have implications for foster parents’ support and training to enhance their resilience, coping, parent stress, satisfaction, and perception of child behaviors.

IRB Number

17-139

Degree

B. S. W.; An honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Social Work.

Date

5-2018

Subject

Foster home care

Keyword

ACEs; Resilience; Coping; Foster parents

Discipline

Social Work

Document Type

Theses

Extent

43 leaves

DCMI Type

Text

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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Social Work Commons

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