The Family and Group Practice Research Centre

Principal Investigator: Joyce L. C. Ma;
Co-Investigator: Julia Lo;
Co-Investigator: Tiffany Lo;
Co-Investigator: Dr. Joanne Wong (SAHK)

This project is a research collaboration between our Centre and SAHK.

In order to further examine the effectiveness of family-centered intervention and to modify and develop a culturally specific and socially relevant treatment model for families with an adult member diagnosed HFA, an extended two-year project is thus now proposed. The team had designed, carried out, and studied the precious family-centered interventions for these families and had accumulated rich experiences. In this new project, both family therapy service and multiple family therapy services will be provided, with more emphasis on developing a MFG model for this clientele.

This project is a research collaboration between our Centre, Brain and Mind Institute and Department of Psychology.

Clinical social work and psychology shared the same goal of enhancement and maintenance of psychosocial functioning of individuals, families, and social groups of people. Both disciplines have been endeavored in developing different effective psychosocial interventions in mental health, with clinical social work putting more emphasis on the socio-contextual influences on the persons, while psychology emphasizes more on the intrapersonal factors.

This cross-disciplinary study aims to explore the family participatory experiences in online family counseling. With the joint contributions from the disciplines of social work and psychology, exploration and consolidation of the knowledge on the intervention process could be in a more holistic way, i.e. with both socio-contextual dimension and intrapersonal dimension.

Project objectives:

1. To disseminate the knowledge and wisdom regarding the understanding on ADHD developed from “the Study of the Efficacy of an Indigenous Multi-Family Groups for Chinese Families in Hong Kong with children suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders”.
2. To promote strength-based and resilience-focused understanding of ADHD among the families with children with ADHD, the community and the helping professionals in Hong Kong, in addition to the existing deficit and behavior-based model;
3. To reduce social stigmatization of the disorder for children with ADHD and their parents;
4. To equip helping professionals with the knowledge about family-centered intervention model in working with children with ADHD.

This project is a research collaboration between our Centre and Hong Kong Family Welfare Society

The objectives aim at:

1. To develop a socially relevant and culturally appropriate measuring tool, which has sound psychometric properties in terms of reliability and validity, to assess family well-being of Hong Kong people; and
2. To identify the well-being of Hong Kong families.

To develop an index of family well-being index and track the changes of Hong Kong families over time, this study will adopt mixed methods and a cross-sectional design. In general, this study will be divided into three parts.

1. Development of the family well-being index: literature review, focus group and pilot survey
2. Phone survey
3. Promotion of the tool and follow-up plan

This project is a research collaboration between our Centre and Hong Kong Family Welfare Society.

This study is designed to study Hong Kong social workers’ training needs for financial social work practice, with a focus on the suitable contents and modes of the Financial Social Work (FSW) training program, and to evaluate the outcome of FWS training program, specifically, the Financial Social Work (FSW) Certification program. As such, this evaluation study will conduct both need assessments and outcome evaluations.

The study will adopt mixed research methods with quantitative and qualitative methods. For needs assessment, participants of FWS training program will join the focus group for investigation on their experience in the training program and training needs. Taking reference from the content of focus group, online survey will be designed for Hong Kong social workers’ completion to investigate their training needs. For outcome evaluations, it consists of on-site participant observation, focus group, and in-depth interview. Questionnaires with a single group pre/post design will also be distributed to participants of FWS training program to examine the effectiveness of the training program.

This project is a research collaboration between our Centre and Hong Kong Family Welfare Society.

The objectives aim at exploring:

1. the phenomenon of mental health difficulties of foster care children
2. their mental health services utilization condition and experiences. The findings will help us to reflect the mental health needs of children residing in foster care, and to suggest recommendations for fostering mental well-being for the vulnerable community in Hong Kong.

The research study adopts a mixed-method approach, composing of both quantitative and qualitative study.

The quantitative study will examine:

1. the rate of various types of mental health difficulties, including rates of clinical-level difficulties, among foster care children
2. the factors related to mental health difficulties of foster care children
3. the service utilization rate of foster care children who are in need of mental health service
4. the factors related to the utilization of mental health service of foster care children

The qualitative study will examine:

1. the lived experiences of foster care children of using mental health service
2. the perceived helpful and unhelpful elements of mental health service for the foster care children

This project is a research collaboration between our Centre and Hong Kong Family Welfare Society.

The objectives are as follows:

1. To screen preschool children that have social emotional difficulties;
2. To evaluate the intervention group and program for children, parents, and school personnel with the aim to facilitate children’s social emotional development;
3. To evaluate the overarching achievement of the services in enhancing the social emotional development of children;
4. To collect school personnel and service users’ satisfaction levels and utilization of kindergarten school social work service.

The research project consists of the following parts:

Study 1: Identify children with social emotional difficulties

Study 2: Evaluate the group intervention for children

Study 3: Evaluate the group intervention for parents

Study 4: Evaluate the parent-child activities

Study 5: Evaluate the overarching achievement of the services in Level II to IV

Study 6: Service users’ and school personnel’ perceived helpfulness, satisfaction level and utilization of services in Level II to IV

This project is a research collaboration between our Centre and New Life Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association.

This study aims to:

• develop a clinically useful, culturally relevant and socially effective model of practice on MFT with Chinese families with a parent or two in recovery of major depression;
• evaluate the applicability and treatment efficacy of MFT in helping Chinese families with a parent or parents in recovery of depression; and
• identify theories of change so developed by using the data set generated in this research including the family experiences toward MFT and their subjective experiences in the group process.