In the last couple of years, in research, policy and practice concerning the care and treatment of vulnerable and troublesome children and their families, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of the effectiveness of the applied interventions: do they work? Our knowledge about ‘evidencebased’ approaches to effective child, youth and family interventions has been growing during the last decade.

An issue of at least as much scientific interest and societal importance is the question of how and why these interventions work. This book – published in the context of the 11th Biennial International Conference of the European Scientific Association on Residential and Foster care for children and adolescents (EUSARF) at Groningen, the Netherlands – offers a broad and compact view on the latest international findings and provides insight into the factors and conditions which underlie the outcomes – positive and negative – of current child and family interventions and arrangements.

The volume is a reference work for all those practitioners, academics, researchers, managers, policymakers, students and all others interested in developments and research findings on interventions regarding vulnerable and troublesome children and their families.

The editors – Erik Knorth, Margrite Kalverboer and Jana Knot-Dickscheit – all work at the University of Groningen, Department of Special Needs Education and Youth Care (in Dutch: Orthopedagogiek), the Netherlands.