Foster Youth & Social Support: The First Randomized Controlled Trial of Independent Living

Background & Purpose:One development area that is often part of independent living programs for older foster youth is assisting them as they prepare to exit care with either building social skills to improve the likelihood that they will have supportive adults in their lives, and/or connecting them to programs with staff that may serve as mentors, and thus provide social support. The overall goal is to assist emancipating youth with developing a social support network, so that once they leave foster care, they can access this key coping mechanism when dealing with the stressors associated with aging out. The purpose of this study was to conduct secondary data analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of Massachusetts’ Adolescent Outreach Program for Youths in Intensive Foster Care (“Outreach”) for increasing social support among enrolled youth. We hypothesized that Outreach compared to services as usual (SAU; control group) would increase participants’ social support. Given that prior studies show that minority children of color in foster care are less likely to receive services than their Caucasian counterparts, we also hypothesized that disparities in social support as a function of Outreach would also prevail.

Method:194 youth in intensive foster care under the guardianship of the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families with a goal of independent living or long term substitute care, and born between August 1985 and December 1990 (67% female, 66% White, 27% Hispanic) were randomly assigned to Outreach or SAU between September, 2004 and March, 2009. Treatment effects were tested using mixed-effect models; group assignment was treated as a between-subject factor and time was treated as a within-subject factor. The dependent variable, social support, was calculated by summing the numerical responses across seven domains (Courtney, Stagner, & Pergamit, 2001). Items were not mutually-exclusive; youth could count the same person for all items.

Results: There was no significant interaction between treatment type and time (Joint Test: =0.52 (df=2), p=0.77), suggesting no short- or long-term effect of the Outreach program Racial/ethnic disparities in program effect were not detected.

Conclusion & Implications: Providers of independent living services should re-consider how best to build and strengthen social support among the foster youth they serve. Although the positive influence of attaining and nurturing supports for youth aging out of foster care is on its way to becoming a well-documented protective factor, more research is needed to identify how, when, and under what conditions to implement evidence-based, culturally responsive interventions to ensure youth are connected to peer, social, and community networks during and after their experience in foster care. This is the first study to provide evidence that there are no differences in levels of social support between minority and non-minority youth making the transition to adulthood. This is also the first study to examine the differences between an independent living program and SAU to increase social support among youth in foster care transitioning to adulthood, using a rigorous RCT design.