Care Giver’s Knowledge: A Stimulus for Advocated Alternative Family Care for Children in Kenya

Abstract

Public campaigns augment caregiver’s knowledge base on advocated alternative family care arrangement for children. Awareness campaigns through public barazas and community dialogues complement milestones in implementing government social policies in child protection. Pointers on caregiver’s knowledge of alternative family care however expose a dreary stimulus to the practice of the advocated care arrangements among care givers. This paper examined care giver’s knowledge as stimulus for advocated alternative family care for children practice in Migori County, Kenya. Specifically the paper examined care givers knowledge and perception of advocated alternative family care arrangements in Kenya. The study was guided by the social theory of action systems by Talcott Parsons and theory of structuration by Antony Giddens premised on the fact that actions of individuals regulate social order. Descriptive cross sectional survey design was used and data collection involved mixed methods, where both quantitative and qualitative data were collected by use of semi structured questionnaires from a sample size of 399 and guiding questions for focus groups. Data from quantitative methods were analyzed using inferential and descriptive statistics with the aid of (SPSS) version 23 and, both correlation statistics and mean were used to organize and summarize the data for meaningful interpretations. Analysis of qualitative data adopted methodologies that drew from both a framework analysis and content analysis. The paper revealed that care givers were knowledgeable of the advocated alternative family care arrangements with 58% of the respondents pointing that they were best for child protection but pointed to the complications 11% and non practicability 8% in acquisition and use. Computation of the Karl Pearson correlation coefficient statistics revealed a moderate negative correlation of sociodemographic characteristics on knowledge of alternative family care at -0.568. The paper recommends that the Government of Kenya formalize all alternative family care arrangements for enhanced child protection intervention.