Session: Examining the Relationship Among Juvenile Dependency Court Processes, Decision-Making, and Child-Welfare Outcomes (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Background: Juvenile dependency courts drive much of the public’s action on behalf of children who may have been or who are at risk of maltreatment. These courts, including the legal and service professionals who work within them, are responsible for critical decisions affecting child safety, permanency, and well-being. Yet while the importance of dependency courts is widely recognized, there is a lack of rigorous research on how court processes and decision-making affect the timing and disposition of child welfare cases. This symposium brings together four papers that examine the relationships between child welfare outcomes and several important attributes of juvenile dependency courts, including the quality of court hearings, level of client engagement, and quality of legal representation and judicial decision-making. This symposium will also include a discussant who has written extensively about the intersection between the juvenile court and child welfare system.

Methods: These papers draw from research in several different states using a variety of data sources, including court observation, in person interviews of foster youth, web-based attorney surveys and state administrative databases. The papers make use of both qualitative and quantitative data analyses.

Findings: The first paper, based on two studies using court observation, finds that holding more robust hearings where parents are active participants may help improve outcomes for children and families. The two studies in this paper point to the importance of all stakeholders finding ways to engage parents in the court process, such as increasing the range of topics discussed at court. The second paper, based on interviews with foster youth ages 16.75 and 17.75 who had been in care for at least six months, finds that, although youth reported extensive involvement with the juvenile court and were generally satisfied with their involvement, youths’ involvement in court proceedings does not appear to influence whether they remained in care at age 19. The third paper examines the relationships among assessed judicial quality and the timeliness of several juvenile court milestones, and finds that judicial quality is negatively associated with exit to reunification, but is not related to any other milestone. The last paper reports on the results of a multi-site, cluster randomized controlled evaluation of the impact of a training program for attorneys representing children in dependency cases. Findings show that the impacts on legal practice and child outcomes may be limited to specific circumstances, populations, and outcomes.

Implications: Collectively, these findings underscore the complex relationships among juvenile court practices and child welfare outcomes. Specifically, these findings suggest that the impact of specific court practices will not only reflect the merits of the practices themselves, but will also reflect the influence of several other interrelated factors, including the contexts in which practices are implemented (e.g., jurisdiction, hearing type), case characteristics and legal status, and limitations on the purview and mission of juvenile courts. The complexity of these relationships have important implications for the nature, and potential limitations, of court improvement efforts.