Ohio Sobriety, Treatment, and Reducing Trauma (Ohio START) is a family-centered child welfare service delivery intervention that builds on cross-system collaboration
with behavioral health service organizations to provide timely access to substance use disorder (SUD) treatment services for parents involved with the child welfare system.

The study has three specific aims: 

1. To determine whether the overlap between parental activity spaces and child welfare workers’ referral networks (i.e., proximity and availability of SUD treatment providers) predicts intermediate (i.e., SUD treatment service use, family resilience) and long-term (i.e., parent substance use, child psychosocial-behavioral health, child maltreatment) family health outcomes.

2. To examine how parents’ engagement with family peer mentors is associated with changes in the attributes of parental activity spaces and social networks over time, and how these changes, in turn, are associated with family health outcomes.

3. To test whether rurality moderates the effects of SUD treatment referral networks, activity spaces, and social networks on family health outcomes.

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The proposed project will produce valuable knowledge that can be used to modify START and other family-level intervention efforts to mitigate risks and maximize protection in parents’ activity spaces and social networks to enhance family resilience, prevent child maltreatment, and promote child well-being in rural communities.