State Variations in Tracking Parental Disability in Foster Care Administrative Data

Background

Despite increasing attention of experiences of parents with disabilities and their families in the child welfare system, there is little information on actual prevalence rates of these families. By federal mandate, all states must submit foster care data semiannually to the Children’s Bureau.  This consolidation of case-level data is captured into foster care files under the Adoption and Foster Care Reporting System (AFCARS). One removal reason titled “inability to cope” relates to parental disability, as it tracks cases in which the caretaker has a “physical or emotional illness or disabling condition.” The purpose of this study is to explore how states vary in their use of this removal reason, and how this removal reason correlated with demographic characteristics of the children and policy context of the states.

Methods

This study uses administrative data from the 2010 - 2012 years of AFCARS. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression were used to explore frequencies of states’ use of the parental disability removal reason, correlations with children’s demographic status, and correlation with the presence of state child welfare statutes regarding disability.  Additionally, administrative reports from the Children’s Bureau were reviewed for state compliance with recommended data recording procedures for removal reasons.

Results

This study finds that 19.5% of foster children had at least one removal reason of parental disability, and 5.6% had parental disability as their sole removal reason.  Parental disability as a removal reason is very inconsistent across states, both as the sole removal reason and in combination with other reasons.  Ten percent of states had very high use of the parental disability removal reason (reported in over 30% of the cases), while seventeen percent of states had very minimal use (under 5% of the cases). Children whose caretakers were under 18 (O.R. =1.5) and over 60 (O.R. =1.4) were more likely to have the parental disability removal reason, as were children with disabilities (O.R. = 1.4). Children were 1.4 times more likely to have their only parental removal reason as parental disability if they lived in a state with parental disability language in their child welfare statute.  The review of administrative reports also shows that there are significant data collection issues in many states and removal reason data is often under-reported.

Implications

This study finds that the parental disability removal reason, titled “inability to cope”, is not being applied consistently across states.  The removal reason might cause confusion amongst those entering the data, not only because of its euphemistic title that is not descriptive of its meaning of parental disability, but also potentially because of state policy contexts and that it is the only removal reason that is not a behavior. While collecting data on parental disability could provide very informative data regarding needed services, this may be better tracked along with other demographic data versus as a removal reason category.