Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

Experiencing multiple placements while in substitute care has been associated with a host of poor outcomes for children and families (e.g., Budde et al., 2004; Courtney et al., 2004; Leslie et al., 2000). Nonetheless, placement movement is often a necessary step in achieving permanence. Unfortunately, prior examinations of placement movement have tended to amalgamate disparate types of placement moves and, as a result, have provided a confounded picture of placement instability. Thus, the intent of this study was to explore, in depth, the nature of and circumstances surrounding placement movement. Data for this study came from several different sources, including a web-based survey of 1,192 child welfare caseworkers (90.0% response rate) and administrative data records describing the substitute care placement histories of over 200,000 children in care in Illinois. In addition to the descriptive analyses of data from the web survey, children's administrative data records were linked to placement-specific data collected in the web survey, allowing for a combination of prospective, survey-based longitudinal analyses of the predictors of placement movement and large-sample, administrative data analyses. The study findings reveal that placement movement was due to a mix of factors and circumstances. Web survey results suggest that children's prior placement instability had been comprised of moves that were both planned (e.g., moves to pre-adoptive homes and moves to allow co-placement with siblings) and unplanned (e.g., moves precipitated by foster home life events or children's emotional and behavioral problems). Workers reported that over three-quarters (75.9%) of children's most recent placement moves were due, at least in part, to foster parents' inability or unwillingness to continue fostering. Among those moves attributed to foster parents, the specific reasons most commonly cited by workers included foster parent's inability to tolerate children's behavioral or emotional problems (27.6%) and the occurrence of one or more changes in foster parents' circumstances (20.0%) (e.g., divorce or marriage, change in employment, etc.). Moreover, findings from the prospective analyses of children placement histories suggest that, while the likelihood of some types of placement movement (e.g., moves to other foster homes) are significantly associated with workers' assessments of foster home quality, other types of moves (e.g., moves to residential care) are not affected by the assessed quality of foster homes. Not surprisingly, when asked to select from a list the types of services they believed would help to maintain children's current placements, a significant proportion of workers recommended services that either addressed foster families as an integrated unit, such as foster family counseling (27.2%), and/or services that fall under the broader rubric of caregiver support, such as respite care (25.1%), transportation assistance (22.8%), and recreational / after-school programming (46.5%). Taken together, workers' assessments of the causes of children's most recent placement moves, their recommendations for the types of services needed to stabilize placements, and the findings from the analyses of children placement histories provide compelling, albeit indirect, evidence that foster family-centered services may mitigate placement instability.