Kinship Family Relatedness, Family Contact, and Social Support Among Foster Youth

Background: Increasingly, public child welfare agencies are seeking to place foster youth with kinship families. These policies are based, in part, on findings suggesting that placement with kin leads to more frequent contact with biological families and communities, which can result in greater social support for youth upon emancipation from care. On their face, these policies seem to be well-warranted, given research suggesting that extended families are an important source of social support, and that social support influences a broad swatch of outcomes in young adulthood. However, recent work involving informal kinship care suggests that biological family contact and social support varies significantly depending upon the relationship (i.e., relatedness) between kinship caregivers and the children in their care. Using a sample of foster youth in California, the present study seeks to extend this work by (a) identifying distinct kinship family household types based on the relatedness of kinship household members and (b) examining the interrelationships among kinship family household type, youth's contact biological family, and perceived social support.

Methods: Data for this study were drawn from public-use datasets generated by the federal evaluation of Chafee-funded programs for foster youth. These data were collected via several waves of computer-assisted personal interviews of youth participating in three separate program evaluations conducted in California. The sample for the current study was limited to those youth who reported residing in kinship foster family homes at the time of their first interview (N=421). The interview instruments contained measures of a number of domains, including youth behavior (Achenbach YSR, NLSY Self-Report Delinquency Scale), frequency of contact with biological family, and perceived positive social support (NSCAW social support questionnaire). Using latent class analysis (LCA), we attempt to identify distinct subpopulations of kinship families based on the relatedness of kinship caregivers vis-à-vis the foster youth in their care. Using the posterior probabilities generated by the LCA, we then examine the interrelationships among kinship foster family household composition, biological family contact, and social support.

Results: Results of the LCA model suggest the existence of four distinct kinship family household types, including households headed, respectively, by grandparents, adult siblings, and other adult relatives. Youth residing in different household types are found to differ with respect to their substitute care histories and reported levels of delinquency and behavioral problems. Moreover, statistically significant differences are found across household types on the frequency of biological family contact, quality of youths' relationships with kinship caregivers, and youths' perceived level of positive social support.

Implications: These findings highlight the potentially important link between youth-caregiver relatedness and extended-family contact and support. These findings also serve to remind us that, as a product of youths' pre-foster-care family histories, kinship foster family placements may differ from one another in ways that influence the nature of care and support that they provide. Finally, these findings underscore the need to study kinship care through an interactionist lens that serves to elucidate the interrelationships between different constructs (like relatedness and social support) and reveal important sources of heterogeneity.