Qualitative Studies of Foster Carer Experiences in Providing Out of Home Care for Children: A Scoping Review and Narrative Synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary In this scoping review, we examined the available qualitative research exploring the experiences of non-relative foster carers providing out of home care for children. Qualitative articles covering the last twenty-five years were extracted from eight databases, Google Scholar and a hand search of the reference sections of identified journals. Using specified inclusion and exclusion criteria, twenty-two articles were retained for analysis. A relatively high degree of consistency was found amongst the studies from a range of countries. Five major themes were identified: Open communication of a child’s needs and behaviours; Full spectrum support; Challenges; Stress; and Rewards. The Challenges theme comprised three sub-themes: Anticipating being a family, Carer bond and loss and Inherent limits of training. The themes reflected by the foster carers encompassed both stresses associated with the challenges of fostering children and personal rewards that encouraged them to begin and maintain their role as carers. The possible implications for practice and further research of the findings are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".