Hui Huang
Project Title: Substance-using parents’ needs and receipt for ancillary services, their relationship to substance use treatment compliance and new child maltreatment reports
Treating substance use problems among parents involved in child welfare services is challenging, since many of them experience co-occurring problems, such as mental illness, domestic violence, and homelessness. Struggles with these co-occurring problems are barriers for them to stay in treatment and recover from substance use problems. Therefore, it is important to provide substance-using parents ancillary services, in addition to substance use treatment. These ancillary services should be matched with individual needs to address their co-occurring problems. This pilot study is a unique collaboration between researchers at FIU and the family preservation program of Citrus Health Network, Inc., a community provider of mental and behavioral health services in South Florida. This study will use a mixed-method approach involving both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. The quantitative data will be used to answer the question whether higher ratio of achieving goals of ancillary services is associated with higher rates of complying with substance use treatment, which in turn, is associated with lower rates of having new child maltreatment reports. The qualitative data will be used to answer the question: which organizational factors influence the degree to which ancillary services are used in combination with substance use treatment. This pilot study will be the first study of ancillary service use among substance-using parents in South Florida. The findings on the impacts of ancillary services can be useful to service providers in other metropolitan areas that serve a large size of minority populations including immigrants in their child welfare system.
Research Interests
Child Welfare, Substance Abuse, Juvenile Justice, Program Evaluation, Measurement Development
Assistant Professor
School of Social Work
Dr. Hui Huang’s research focuses primarily on developing and evaluating macro-level interventions for children and families involved in child welfare, substance use treatment, and justice systems, as well as other public services. Dr. Huang received extensive training in applied research methods and obtained a master’s degree in applied statistics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In Illinois, Dr. Huang was involved in evaluating the Alcohol and Other Drugs Demonstration at the Illinois Title IV-E Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse (AODA) Waiver Demonstration, which implements the innovative recovery coach model to serve substance-abusing caregivers, and uses experimental design for evaluation. Since joining the faculty at Florida International University in 2013, she has had four funded projects: two principal investigators (PI), one co- principal investigators (Co-PI), and one co-investigator (Co-I). Her first PI project evaluated the crossover youth practice model, which is an innovative model serving youth involved in both the child welfare and the juvenile justice systems. Her second PI project evaluated a campus support program serving former foster youth and homeless students in college. Also, she collaborated with faculty from the Department of Psychology and served as the Co-I on a project testing the parent-child interaction therapy among children under age five at risk for abuse and neglect. More recently, Dr. Huang has been collaborating with Dr. Shamra Boel-Studt at Florida State University and serving as a Co-PI on a project to develop and test the Group Care Quality Rating Scale, which is a multi-dimensional, multi-informant assessment designed to measure the quality of services provided to children and youth in Florida’s DCF-licensed residential group homes. Dr. Huang has maintained a productive record of disseminating research findings through publications and conference presentations.