Effects of Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) Intervention on Permanency Outcomes for Wards of the State: The Case of Virginia

Background and Purpose: In the United States, there are approximately 402,378 children in foster care at any given time. Long-term, unstable placements in foster care have been correlated with higher risks of developing emotional and behavioral problems, unemployment, homelessness, criminal activity, substance abuse, and early pregnancies. The Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program was created to mitigate these negative outcomes for children by providing additional advocacy on behalf of the best interest of the child. Little research has been done on the effects of the CASA intervention on permanency outcomes and of research done, all consisted of small sample sizes at the county level. There is no current research on the effects of CASA intervention on permanency outcomes at the state level. Previous literature focused on the effectiveness of the intervention as a whole and concluded that CASA volunteers are just as effective at providing advocacy as paid attorneys and help provide both children and their families with more services. The current study examined whether there was a relationship between CASA intervention and parental reunification for children in foster care, the ideal permanency outcome according to child welfare system standards. The hypothesis proposed was that CASA intervention cases would result in higher likelihoods of parental reunifications than other permanency outcomes as compared to Non-CASA intervention cases.

Methods: A secondary data analysis on 136 individual child victim cases from the public dataset Evaluating the Virginia Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) Program, 1991-1995 was performed. Using SAS 9.4, multiple logistic regressions on the effects of intervention status (CASA, DSS, DSS/CASA Comparison) on final permanency outcomes (parental reunification, other) were conducted controlling for social demographic factors.

Results: Results implied that the CASA intervention is almost four times more likely to achieve parental reunification than DSS only or DSS/CASA Comparison groups (OR: 3.98; CI: 1.15, 14.91). The data showed that the DSS/CASA intervention as compared to DSS was not significant. Race remained the only control variable that was significantly related to the probability of a child being reunified with their parents. Results (OR: 2.25; CI: 1.06, 4.86) implied that the odds of white children being reunified with parents are 2.25 times the odds of children of other races being reunified with parents.

Conclusions and Implications: The CASA intervention is four times more likely to achieve parental reunification, the ideal permanency outcome according to child welfare system standards. The CASA volunteer program should be more widely advocated for to increase the number of CASA volunteers, ensuring every child entering foster care is adequately advocated for. Although the DSS/CASA Comparison group included CASA volunteers, cases requiring both workers are generally more severe where parental reunification is not a viable outcome. Future research should focus on evaluating whether the DSS/CASA Comparison groups still achieve more positive permanency outcomes (relative placement and adoption) rather than negative permanency outcomes (permanent foster care, permanent group home, or age out) for children who are unable to be reunified with parents as compared to non-CASA intervention cases.