Book Review: Uncoupling

detail as to how the service providers were better prepared to work with disabled children (other than through their past training and experience in social work, about which no information is given) than were any other social workers who might be assigned to this population. In other words, the intervention itself is not specified. There appears to have been no systematic way of providing the service, no systematic training for assigned workers, and no way of ascertaining the specific ways in which workers were to best utilize the fifteen hours per week they were assigned to the project. Seminars were developed during the course of the project to provide workers with new information about the problems faced by and services available to families of developmentally disabled children, but little data are available on the effects of maturation over time of the service providers working with the project. These flaws in the design of the project may well have contributed to the lack of clinically or statistically significant findings stemming from the study. Having worked with this population as a clinician, this reviewer is aware of the need for specialized training as well as specific goals and objectives for working with these children and their families. Analysis of these specialized methods would be most helpful to future research efforts. The author's suggestion that the project was a true quasi-experimental design is not completely satisfactory, because the nature of the services that were provided to families who were not a part of the Resource Worker Project could not be ascertained. One cannot be assured that workers who were not assigned to the project might not have been equally helpful to families as were those assigned for fifteen hours per week, because no data were gathered on the former category of service providers or on the actual services received by the "comparison group" families during the project. Moreover, cost-effectiveness discussions are premature in that the services that were provided were not compared with the cost of similar services provided by other professionals in a traditional agency, or with the cost if parents had been directly prepared "to take action by themselves, by equipping them with the information and confidence they needed in order to obtain help on their own behalf." Glendinning's work excels, however, in its detailed description of the, numerous and varied problems faced by families of disabled children as well as the children themselves. Chapters Five through Ten offer rich information in the areas of housing adaptation, use of medical services, interaction with educational programs, training for practical daily living skills, respite care, adult placement decisions, and access to financial services. The book also includes a discussion of familial and sibling interaction with the disabled child, an issue generally not found in most texts on working with the families of the developmentally disabled. Although these chapters do not discuss outcome measures in the technical sense, they provide helpful information nevertheless. The graphic presentation of data and quotes from service providers and parents also enrich the book. Chapters Eleven and Twelve present implications for research, evaluation, and policy. These are somewhat overstated, given the findings and design of the project, but do point out that in England as well as the United States, the provision of services to disabled children and their families "still appears to be fragmented, variable in scope, implemented in different ways, and available in some areas but not others." This book can be helpful in preparing students for direct practice with developmentally disabled families because it provides helpful information on the multiplicity of challenges faced by these families. As a contribution to intervention research, however, the design problems of the project detract from its overall usefulness to researchers or practitioners.