Brief and intensive family support program to prevent emergency placements: Lessons learned from a process evaluation

This article presents the results from the evaluation of the Montreal Brief and Intensive Intervention (BII) program designed to prevent emergency placements or other longer-term services by Youth centers in situations involving family crises by providing short-term, intensive interventions. A multimethods evaluation design was used to evaluate program implementation, processes and outcomes. Quantitative implementation evaluation results showed that the program was globally well implemented, except for two of its core principles: intervention briefness and concrete support. Qualitative process evaluation results were helpful in explaining why these principles were poorly implemented and underscored, in particular, the importance of BII staff members' understanding and attitudes. The implementation results were linked to the outcome evaluation results in order to identify the predictors (characteristics of families and intervention) of success of the intervention. Practical implications are discussed.