Social Capital as a Moderator of the Effect of Subsidized Guardianship On Permanency Outcomes

Background and Purpose: Social capital refers to the resources that accrue to persons from their social ties. The concept encompasses both tangible resources, such as material assistance, as well as intangible ones, such as emotional security. Children's safety and well-being depend on their ability to access reliably the social capital of parents and others in their parents' networks. When parents are deemed unsuitable for this function, public child welfare is responsible for reassigning to substitute parents the rights and duties of permanent guardianship of the child's human and social capital. The purposes of this proposed presentation are to describe the social capital of substitute caregivers and to analyze the moderating influences that different forms of social capital have on the effect of subsidized guardianship on caregivers' permanency intentions and children's permanency outcomes. Methods: The proposed presentation uses survey data collected from 293 kinship and foster caregivers of 456 children who were randomly assigned to intervention or comparison groups as part of a randomized controlled trial of subsidized guardianship in Milwaukee, WI. The sample of caregivers is 91% female, 73% African American, 21% white, and 6% Latino and other ethnicities. The measures of social capital were collected from caregivers using instruments developed by Lin, Dumin and Snijder, which measure access to network members' occupations and access to resources across several domains, e.g. material assistance, job finding, and information sharing. They also measure the strength of these ties as indicated by resources accessible from family members (strong ties), friends and neighbors, or acquaintances (weak ties). Measures of permanency intentions were collected from caregiver reports of permanency plans, and outcomes were obtained from administrative data that tracked changes in permanency status for 2 to 4 years. Analyses use logistic regression to estimate the impact of the intervention on permanency plans at different levels of caregiver social capital and event-history methods to track the impact on permanency outcomes. Replicate weights are used to account for survey non-response and clustering within sibling groups. Results: Results suggest that the intervention boosted overall permanency rates, but the impact was greatest for children with caregivers who scored low in levels of exchange social capital. Specifically the relative risk of permanence for families assigned to the subsidized guardianship group was 2.9 for children with access to lower levels of caregiver social capital. While exchange social capital was positively associated with permanence, the intervention effect was reduced by 54% among children with access to higher levels of social capital. Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that the option of subsidized guardianship may encourage caregivers with low exchange social capital to accept permanent legal responsibilities for children. The selection of such families into the program may also account for some caseworkers' concerns that guardianship is less permanent than adoption. Because of the potential for future problems, it is important that permanency planning takes into account the post-permanency needs of these families for formal assistance and support.