Permanency in a Social Structural Context

Background and Purpose: Policy makers, practitioners, and researchers understand that context is important when it comes to understanding the child welfare system and its impact on children and families. How services are organized and the social structural characteristics of place are among the features of context thought to influence service utilization and outcomes. That said, there has been little research that tackles the problem of sorting out effects across levels of data. This is a problem of theory, data, and methods. In this paper, the authors examine the problem, but focus on the methods needed to understand nested data. For theoretical perspective, the authors draw on the theory of social organization and ask whether children are more likely to achieve permanency based on where they live, and if so, do the places with higher rates of permanency share social structural attributes. Methodologically, the authors address the question using discrete time multilevel models. Discrete time models offer an opportunity to ask whether contextual effects persist across the length of time children are in out-of-home care, which allows for a more nuanced understanding of time/context interactions.

Methods: The study is based on 1300 counties. Children included in the sample were placed into out-of-home care for the first time (N=73,000) in 2004 and followed for 4 years. To carry out the discrete time analysis, each placement spell is divided into as many discrete 6-month intervals as their placement spell accommodates (the maximum is 8). The discrete time interval becomes a person-period data stet where exit=1 if the child was discharged to permanency during interval and 0 otherwise. Level-1 covariates include attributes of the children (e.g., age) and their placement history (e.g., placement type); level-2 covariates include poverty rates, proportion of families that are single parent, proportion black, and the placement rate/1000, measured at the county level.

Results: As expected, context affects permanency outcomes although not always in ways that theory would indicate. For example, poverty rates are an indicator of social stress within the community, which suggests that poverty rates and reunification rates would be linked. Our results show otherwise. The results do indicate that placement rates are important in that counties that admit more children/1000 tend to move children to permanency more quickly. Last, the findings indicate contextual effects are most important early on. As children linger in care, the impact of context dissipates.

Conclusions and Implications: Three conclusions emerge from the study. Context is important and cannot be ignored when assessing what happens to children and why. Second, placement processes and exit processes appear to be linked – net of other factors, counties with high entry rates tend to have exit rates. Third, the nuances associated with contextual effects are more easily detected (i.e., the interaction with time-in-care) with discrete time models, which offer the added benefit of working within the HLM framework.