Abstract: A Quasi-Experimental Test of the Effects of Specialized Judicial Caseloads on Reunification for Infants and Toddlers (Society for Social Work and Research 20th Annual Conference - Grand Challenges for Social Work: Setting a Research Agenda for the Future)

Schedule:

Sunday, January 17, 2016: 9:30 AM

Meeting Room Level-Meeting Room 2 (Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel)

* noted as presenting author

Judy Krysik, PhD, MSW, Associate Professor, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ

Lois W. Sayrs, PhD, Director of Research and Evaluation, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ

Background: A major initiative to promote timely family reunification for infants and toddlers is the Safe Babies Court Teams program. This paper summarizes the results of a four-year research undertaking to model reunification of children age birth to 3 years who were served by the program in one large urban county in the southwest.

Methods: Using a quasi-experimental design, data on infants and toddlers subject to dependency proceedings (N = 4,600) were collected from 2010-2014. Data were collected for three groups, a comparison group 18 months prior to program implementation, and two forms of the intervention, the regular program and an enhancement with specialized judicial caseloads. Nonlinear modeling techniques were employed to estimate the probability of successful reunification controlling for the experimental intervention.

Results: The results show that the court intervention alone was not sufficient to reduce time to reunification. However, a court intervention utilizing specialized judicial caseloads increased the overall probability of successful reunification by 6 percent and also reduced time to reunification. Employing a Proportional Hazard Model, the results revealed that specialized caseloads accelerate the average time to reunification. To further inform these results, additional hypotheses were tested to determine the time to reunification in the presence of specialized judicial caseloads as they interact with other effects from case characteristics such as family team decision meetings, services received, and number of parent-child visits.

Implications: The findings show considerable promise for utilizing specialized judicial caseloads to promote better outcomes for infants and toddlers (age 0-3) in specialized dependency courts. Although the Zero-to-Three Safe Baby Court Teams initiative does not require this program component, the evidence suggests that specialized caseloads serve to enhance core program components. Before modifications of similar initiatives incorporating specialized caseloads can be recommended, more research needs to be done to determine the robustness of these effects.