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Background:Although research supports a number of positive well-being outcomes associated with the presence of social support among older adolescents, over 20,000 youth emancipate each year from foster care without achieving legal permanence and with limited social support, placing them at increased risk for myriad negative outcomes. In response, Congress passed the Foster Care Independence Act, mandating the establishment of “personal and emotional support to children aging out of foster care, through mentors and the promotion of interactions with dedicated adults” (P.L. 106-169). Yet, little is known regarding the effectiveness of programming aimed at improving interpersonal skills and social supports for foster youth.
The present study uses secondary data from the Multi-Site Evaluation of Foster Youth Programs, a randomized controlled trial of four independent living programs for youth in foster care. The subject of this investigation is the Life Skills Training Program (LST) of Los Angeles County, CA. We had three interrelated aims: (1) Evaluate the effectiveness of the LST program as compared to services as usual on the change in social support over time; (2) Examine the differences over time in social support by race and ethnicity among LST participants; (3) Investigate the explanatory value of prosocial activities, educational involvement, current living arrangement, employment, victimization experiences, placement instability, and behavioral health symptomology on changes in social support over time among LST participants.
Methods: We employed multilevel longitudinal modeling to investigate changes in social support over three time points (baseline, first follow-up, and second follow-up) among 482 youth (n=234 LST; n=248 control). Primary analyses of treatment effects were tested using multilevel models in which group assignment was treated as a between-subject factor and time was treated as a within-subject factor. Other predictors were also treated as time-invariant, between-subject factors. Based on the Akaike Information Criterion and the Bayes Information Criterion, we tested for a variety of residual variance-covariance structures, and decided to use unstructured residual variance-covariance, which had the best model fit. All statistics were performed using Stata version 12, and all models were fit using maximum-likelihood estimation.
Results:We found a significant reduction in social support across the three time points, but there was no difference in the social support trajectory between the LST and control groups. No racial/ethnic difference in the social support trajectory was detected. We examined whether prosocial activities, educational involvement, employment, current living arrangement, victimization experiences, placement instability, and behavioral health symptomology influence changes in social support over time. The only significant finding we detected was that social support decreased at an exponential rate among youth who were employed at baseline.
Implications:Results underscore the need for further research to critically examine how independent living programming is intended to increase social support and how these practices may be modified to improve the promotion and maintenance of social support over time for youth who age out of foster care.