Dans le champ de la santé mentale, les interventions à domicile se développent depuis 40ans. L’étude actuelle décrit le point de vue d’un échantillon de participantes au premier projet expérimental d’intervention de promotion de la santé mentale à domicile en France. Des entretiens qualitatifs ont eu lieu avec 16 participantes. L’analyse montre que leur expérience de la recherche était positive. Elles ont souligné la souplesse du dispositif, la qualité de l’intervention en termes de guidance, de soutien psychologique et la qualité de la relation avec les intervenantes. Les critiques concernaient l’inexpérience des intervenantes, l’absence de contacts avec d’autres parents, les difficultés liées à l’arrêt de la recherche et la place insuffisante laissée aux pères. La discussion porte sur les enseignements à tirer de l’expérience des bénéficiaires de cette intervention pour le développement d’actions préventives.

Home-visiting programs have become one of the most popular early childhood interventions, though their impact on parents and children remain uncertain. Outcomes measures often rely on experimental quantitative design and little space is offered for the voices of those served by these interventions. This paper presents the results of a qualitative protocol performed by the research team with participants in the CAPEDP project which took place in France from 2005 to 2011.

All 184 women who had accepted at least one home visit in the CAPEDP programme were contacted and invited to participate. Individual and group interviews were conducted with the first 16 who accepted to participate. The semi-structured interview schedule addressed their overall appreciation of the project, their initial concerns, the quality of their relationship with their home visiting psychologist, positive and negative aspects of the intervention and any recommendations they might have for future interventions. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and anonymised. An inductive categorical thematic analysis was performed by the research team.

Participants expressed overall satisfaction with the CAPEDP intervention, underlining the quality of the relationships with the home visitors, usefulness of parental guidance, the fact that the intervention could be adapted to suit their own personal agenda, routine and needs, the importance of learning how to accept help and give help to others. Less positive aspects included the fact that the home visitors were not mothers themselves and that they lacked technical experience, the difficulty ending the relationship at the end of the 27-month project, insufficient integration of fathers, the difficult and time-consuming evaluation protocol and the lack of interaction with other parents during the intervention.

Although mothers who accepted to participate in the qualitative interview schedule may have had a more positive overall experience of the CAPEDP project than those who declined to participate, participants’ points of view provide potentially useful indications for adapting future home-visiting programs to the French context.