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June 2010Vol. 11, No. 5Measuring Consumer Satisfaction With Treatment Foster Care

Agencies that provide Treatment Foster Care (TFC) often need to collect consumer satisfaction information for a number of purposes, including monitoring service quality or staff performance, informing strategic planning, or interpreting client outcomes. A new publication, User’s Guide to Measuring Consumer Satisfaction in Treatment Foster Care, has been developed to provide guidance to TFC agencies considering consumer satisfaction surveys.

Produced by Martha Morrison Dore for the Foster Family-based Treatment Association (FFTA), the guide presents survey results from 91 FFTA-member agencies and provides an analysis of currently used instruments designed to measure consumer satisfaction in treatment foster care. The guide also outlines the factors to be considered in any decision on measuring consumer satisfaction in treatment foster care. A decision tree provides a graphic representation of these decisions.

Many TFC agencies have developed their own multidimensional instrument to measure consumer satisfaction to reflect specific aspects of their program’s structure, process, and outcomes. Information included in this guide about existing standardized multidimensional instruments, their construction, and their content may help agencies assess and improve their current measures. It may also help agencies that are considering the development of a multidimensional measure to have a clearer understanding of how to construct such an instrument and some of the advantages and pitfalls in developing and using such a measure.

The guide is available on the FFTA website:

www.ffta.org/research_outcomes/consumer_user_guide.pdf (335 KB)