Friday, 14 January 2005 - 10:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Child Welfare Services

Using Administrative Child Welfare Data to Identify Sibling Groups

Purpose: California law requires that child welfare agencies place siblings together in foster care whenever possible, in order to preserve these vital relationships for vulnerable children. This requirement can only be met if siblings are identified. In addition, precise evaluation of the degree to which this requirement is met is dependent upon the accuracy with which sibling relationships are identified in a state’s automated child welfare information system. The California system is the Child Welfare Services Case Management System (CWS/CMS). This exploratory study addresses the following question: (1) How well does the CWS/CMS identify siblings and therefore, (2) allow us to reliably measure performance in meeting the legislative expectation of placing siblings together? Improved understanding of data regarding sibling placements should lead to an increase in the number of sibling groups who are able to remain together in care and thus the preservation of healthy relationships for the fragile children in foster care.

Method: The study examines a cross-section of 90,049 children who were in the California foster care system on January 1, 2003. We compare the method currently used to analyze CWS/CMS data to 3 new methods. The current method, which we call the sibling method, bases sibling groups on identified relationships between children, including full, half and step siblings. The second method – the maternal method – bases sibling groups on the relationships between children and mothers. That is, a maternal method sibling group would consist of all children sharing a common mother, even if they are not identified as siblings using the sibling method. The third method – the paternal method – is similar to the maternal method, but bases sibling groups on the relationships between children and fathers. Thus, a paternal method sibling group would consist of all children sharing a common father. The fourth method involves matching geographic coordinates of removal addresses to ascertain whether children lived together at the time of removal. We examine how many children are classified as siblings using each set of criterion separately and combined, and then compare intact sibling placement rates across categories.

Results: The groups identified by these 4 methods overlap to a considerable degree (83 to 97 percent) while there was less overlap between the sibling method and the removal address method (78 percent). Using the sibling, maternal and paternal methods together identifies 63,686 individual children with siblings, which is 1,773 more children than the sibling method alone. Using the sibling method, fully two-thirds of children are placed with some or all of their siblings (66.6%). This rate declines for the combined methods (sibling + maternal: 65.0% and sibling + maternal + paternal: 64.9%) because the combined methods cast a wider net to identify siblings during foster placement decision-making than is currently used.

Discussion: Findings suggest that while the current sibling identification method is effective at capturing sibling relationships, the addition of other identification criteria would increase the validity of research that considers sibling status. As a result, agencies could make placement decisions that maintain more sibling ties.

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