Consultation for Adoption Professionals
Dr. Whitten provides teaching, evaluation, and grant consultation services to adoption professionals. All of her work is grounded in her experience and in empirical findings that professionals can rely on.
Workshops
Dr. Whitten provides programs that match audience need and learning styles. She has taught parents and has made presentations on adoption at national and international psychology conferences. She offers:
- Why is Adoption so Hard? This workshop leads you through the negative emotions that many prospective adoptive parents—possibly your clients—experience during the adoption process, and shows you how to channel them to help clients grow into parents throughout the process.
- Ten Secrets of the Best Adoptive Parents. This workshop teaches you to prepare clients for adoptive parenting. It is based on the latest peer-reviewed evidence-based practices.
- Adoption 101 for the Professional—this inter-professional consultation will help staff expanding into adoption counseling acquire the basic scientific knowledge needed in this specialty area.
Contact Dr. Whitten
Evaluation of service programs to assess and verify effectiveness
Dr. Whitten has worked in program evaluation for 18 years. Most recently, she was on the evaluation team for the Quality Improvement Center on Adoption in Virginia, which helped three departments of social services increase the number of children placed in adoptive homes from foster care. Dr. Whitten can provide:
- Design of valid evaluation plans that balance scientific rigor with available resources.
- Assistance in impartial assessment to provide information for Program Improvement Plans and for grant-funded projects.
- Statistical analyses of changes in adoptive family recruitment, child placement, and child outcomes over time.
- Consultation on data collection, database creation and maintenance.
Contact Dr. Whitten
Grant-writing consultation
Dr. Whitten has obtained grants for clients in human services for over 20 years. She can assist you in developing realistic, measurable objectives to reflect your program’s accomplishments. She has experience creating these in the form of logic models, now considered state-of-the-art in federally funded interventions. She can also help you assess intended program action plans to assure their scientific foundation and workability based on experience of other, similar efforts.
Contact Dr. Whitten
