Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Purpose: Many states provide foster care services until age 18; others until age 21 or older in order to ease the transition to independent living. Recent research (Courtney et al., 2005) suggests youth benefit by staying in care longer. But, even in states where youth can stay until age 21, most still leave long before that. There is little research about how and why youth leave the foster care system. This presentation explores both questions.

Method: The data used are from a longitudinal study of 404 young adults from the Missouri foster care system who were interviewed near their seventeenth birthdays and then every three months until age 19. Youth who left the custody of the child welfare authority during the study were asked in the subsequent interview to describe how and why they left custody, whose idea it was to leave, and whether or not they wanted to leave custody. Two readers read the qualitative responses so as to identify empirical regularities (themes); a codebook was created; and a single reader used NVivo software to code the answers after interrater agreement was established using a subset of the data.

Results: Sixty-three percent of the youth left custody from age 17 to 19. Forty-six percent of youth who left custody during the study and were interviewed reported that it was their idea to leave custody; 36% said it was the caseworker's; 10% said it was the judge's; 7% said it was someone else. Ninety-percent, however, said that they wanted to leave custody when they did so.

Respondents' answers on how they left the foster care system were categorized into nine themes and why these young adults left the system were categorized into five themes. Twenty-three percent reported having left under negative circumstances including being discharged by being thrown out or without prior notice. “I did not understand what was going on. I just signed a paper.” Another 39% indicated that they left of their own will. Fifteen percent said they left because they reached an age where they had to leave. Sixteen percent reported that they left because they had met their goals. Regarding why they left, 39% didn't like their experience in the foster care system. Another 22% indicated that it was due to the system's failure to help. “DFS caused more problems than they helped.”

Implications: This research suggests that efforts are needed to make the foster care system more tolerable and beneficial for young adults so they will elect to stay in care longer and benefit from the resources and services that system involvement can provide. In addition, oversight is needed from supervisors to make sure youth are not discharged prematurely when the system does not require it at an arbitrary age (e.g., 18). In addition, results suggest that older youths' role in case decision-making should be intensified.