Why do people become foster parents?: from the literature to empirical evidence

• Autor(a) principal: Freitas, Lucilina José Gouveia
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/18943
• topic: Foster care; Intention; Retention; Motives; Acolhimento familiar; Intenção; Retenção; Motivos; Psicologia social; Acolhimento de crianças; Família de acolhimento; Motivação; Portugal

Foster care is a preferable child protection service compared to residential care, providing a familial context of development that support children’s needs. A systematic review (study 1) was performed aiming to provide a critical analysis of the literature about factors that explain the intention of becoming and continuing to be a foster family. Forty-nine studies were included, and the results revealed that the intention to become a foster parent derives from motivational factors, personal and family characteristics, individual values and beliefs, social context influences and familiarity with the system. The retention of foster families seems to be related with factors within the child protection system, personal or family characteristics, foster child characteristics and foster care intervention. Based on the research problems identified in the systematic literature review, a second study (empirical quantitative) was performed. We aimed to evaluate the knowledge and opinions of a Portuguese sample about the foster care system and foster parents, and to explore their intentions and reasons to become a foster family. The sample is composed by 177 adults (80.2% female; aged between 18 and 76 years old) and the results wield that there is reduced knowledge about the foster care system, although the sample recognize its importance and that improvements should be made. Besides, a small percent of our participants deeply intends to become a foster family (5.2%) and the main reasons to foster seem to be intrinsic.