Sunday, 16 January 2005 - 10:30 AM

This presentation is part of: Findings from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW): Applying Innovative Methods to Understanding Services and Outcomes for Maltreated Children

Achieving Permanency for Children in Child Welfare

NSCAW data provide a unique opportunity to assess the likelihood that children involved with the child welfare agency enjoy permanent living situations and to study the causal relationships between child and family characteristics and permanency. This paper examines permanency from two perspectives. First, we estimate the probability that children involved with the child welfare system maintain permanency in their own homes with and without involvement of the child welfare agency, as well as, the transitional probability of moving into out-of-home placement. For children with closed CPS investigations or in-home services who remain at home, we will describe their familial transitions (i.e., changes in heads of households). This element of permanency has rarely been understood—that is, what are the base rates of family change in the CWS population for those who are not placed into out of home care. This estimate (M=.1.45 at 18-Months, range of 1-4) combined with the estimates of the number of placement moves (M= 2.1 at 18-months, range of 1-7), will help us to better understand the mobility of all CWS involved children.

Next, for children who are in out-of-home placement we calculate the conditional probabilities for multiple pathways towards permanency. At the beginning of the study 89% of the national sample is living in their own home, the paper summarizes the likelihood that children with different characteristics remain in their own home throughout the first 18 months of the study. For children who are in out-of-home placement at the beginning of the study, 11% of the national sample, the paper calculates the likelihood of reunification with birth parents, guardianship with a relative and steps towards adoption such as having a permanency plan for adoption and termination of parental rights. Additionally, it estimates the cumulative probability of achieving each type of permanency at different points in time after entry to placement. Paper four uses competing risks event history analyses with weighted and stratified data to assess the probability of reunification (n=417), termination of adoption or guardianship (n = 469), or remaining in long-term foster care (n = 612). For each group of children, competing risks event history analysis is used to test the impact of predictor variables, such as baseline and 18-month measures of child well-being like the CBCL, adolescent delinquency and substance abuse, poverty level, parental risk factors, receipt of services and history of maltreatment on the likelihood of reunification, adoption/guardianship, or remaining in care for children of different ages.

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