Test of an Intervention for Improving Sibling Relationship Quality Among Youth in Foster Care

Background and Significance: Approximately 70% of foster youth have one or more siblings in care and over half of state child welfare systems have policies promoting sibling co-placement (Shlonsky et al., 2005). Although siblings may serve as essential conduits for social support and psychological development for foster youth (East & Khoo, 2005), few child welfare interventions have focused specifically on sibling relationship enhancement. Supporting Siblings in Foster Care (SIBS-FC) is a NIMH-funded manualized intervention designed for 11-15 year old foster youth with a younger brother/sister within four years of age and also in care. The intervention program seeks to improve sibling communication, cooperation, planning, and problem solving through 8 skill-building sessions and 4 community activities. This study examined treatment effects for older and younger sibling outcomes of sibling relationship quality over the full 18-month study period.

 

Methods: 328 siblings (164 dyads) in foster care were universally recruited from Oregon Department of Human Services, and sibling pairs were randomly assigned to participate in the SIBS-FC intervention or receive community-as-usual services. At baseline, the mean age for older and younger siblings was 13.1 (SD=1.4) and 10.7 years (SD=1.75), respectively. Over half (56%) of youth lived in non-relative foster care, and had been living with their caregiver for over 2 years. Moreover, about 60% of youth were non-White. Outcome measures included youth-reported sibling relationship quality (SRQ) (Shortt & Gottman, 1997; OS α=.98, YS α=.97), a multi-agent construct of SRQ which consisted of 7 items from four reporting agents (OS α=.77, YS α=.73), and sibling self-efficacy (OS α=.89, YS α=.86). Based on an intent-to-treat design, 4-level hierarchical linear models were conducted separately for older and younger siblings to examine the impact of the sibling intervention over the 18-month time period controlling for age, gender, race, and living situation (together/apart).

 

Results: HLM analyses revealed significant improvements in SRQ on the multi-agent construct, arguably the strongest measure of SRQ, for both older and younger siblings. Treatment was significantly associated with higher average relationship construct scores for older siblings (, p<0.05) and younger siblings (, p<0.05). The intervention also had a positive effect on the score’s change over time for older siblings (, p<0.05) and younger siblings (, p<0.05), suggesting that intervention youth improved at a greater rate than their counterparts. For older siblings, there was also a significant treatment effect (p<0.05) for sibling self-efficacy and a trend level effect (p<0.10) for youth-reported SRQ across the 18-month time period.

Conclusion: The sibling relationship may provide a universal and non-stigmatizing point of entry into the family for prevention programming in child welfare (Feinberg et al., 2012). Given the promising study findings in SRQ improvement, future research may seek to examine the suitability of sibling-focused psychosocial interventions for different foster youth, and test whether these interventions impact permanency and wellbeing outcomes. Such sibling relationship-focused intervention development and testing is essential in child welfare given the unique family role of siblings in foster care and the considerable social-relational needs of pre-adolescent and adolescent foster youth.