The social support in kinship foster care: a way to enhance resilience.

Abstract

This paper analyses how social support enhances family resilience in kinship foster families by involving the families in an educational group programme. Sixty-two kinship foster families from Spain participated in the research. The data were collected before the programme (interviews) and after the programme (interviews and focus groups), and it was analysed by content analysis with the program Atlas.ti. The results show that the factors that contribute most to the development of family resilience are (i) feeling able to look for solutions when faced with problems; (ii) an increase of their network of formal support; (iii) being able to offer support to other foster families; and (iv) feeling that the support they give to parents' foster children is socially recognized.