PICCOLO within the Participative and Transformative Evaluation framework in the italian anti-poverty policy “Citizenship income”

The Italian anti-poverty policy (Citizenship Income) establishes a priority of attention to children aged 0 to 3 years old, through parenting support, within the comprehensive care plan aimed at social and labor inclusion of all family members, as appropriate. A research-action-training initiative has been conducted to evaluate parenting and children outcomes of these care plans and to study factors of effectiveness. Drawing on a pragmatic methodology called "Participatory and Transformative Evaluation" (P.T.E.; Serbati & Milani, 2013; Serbati, 2017), initial and in-process training, service professionals' actions with families, and research actions related to data production and analysis are organized in iterative phases. Within this framework, the information produced has two purposes: to create accountability for the professional services; to create spaces for negotiation and reflexivity with families and professional teams to define and monitor the goals of the care plan. P.T.E. also informs the Citizenship Income policy family support actions. The presentation will focus on the usage mode and the results of PICCOLO as part of the participatory assessment process. It was employed in two different moments with 58 families to explore the presence of parents’ responses to young children's developmental needs. In addition to the practitioner's observation and score, it was proposed to parents – conceived as co-evaluators – to self-assign scores to their interactions. The practitioner was invited to facilitate a dialogue with the parent, analyzing convergences and divergences, asking the parent how much they felt represented by the descriptions returned by the practitioners and the relevance he attributed to the behaviors analyzed, to stimulate the emergence of the parent's point of view. The comparison between scores shows that the differences between observers have decreased at the second evaluation, and not considerably changed in absolute terms at the end of the support experience.