Does Transition Planning Increase Service Use Among Older Adolescents in Foster Care?

Background and Purpose. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars are set aside each year for Independent Living Programs (ILPs), which offer a range of services intended to prepare older youth in foster care for the transition to adulthood. However, many youth do not receive ILPs (Okpych, 2015), and this may be due in part to their lack of engagement in transition planning with their child welfare worker. Since little empirical evidence exists on how youths’ participation in planning decisions affects their ILP utilization, this study seeks to understand the relationship between Transitional Independent Living Plan (TILP) participation and ILP utilization.

Methods. Our sample includes all youth in California foster care who had been in care for more than 180 days, were about 17 in December 2012, had TILP and ILP records, and were in foster care on their 19th birthday (n=1,625). We use California child welfare administrative records to capture youths’ demographic characteristics, foster care and maltreatment histories, and TILP and ILP records. The CalYOUTH caseworker surveys conducted in 2013 (n = 235; RR = 89%) and 2015 (n = 295; RR = 96%) with representative samples of child welfare workers who supervise transition-age youth provide county context information (e.g., quality of collaboration with other service systems, percentage of caseworkers who specialize in serving older youth). The explanatory variable is the number of TILPs youth participated in per year in care. The dependent variables are the number of ILPs used per month in care and the scope of ILPs used (i.e., the number of different types of ILPs used). We use Poisson regression to predict the number of ILPs used per month and linear regression to estimate the scope of ILPs used. We control for various youth-level and county-level factors.

Results. On average, youth had about one TILP per year in care, used about one ILP per month in care, and used 7-8 different types of ILPs during a 2-year period. Regression analyses find that each additional TILP a youth participated in significantly (p<.01) increased the number of ILPs they received and the odds of receiving more types of ILPs. While few youth-level characteristics were associated with youth’s ILP utilization patterns (e.g., youth with more frequent placement changes used fewer ILPs), many county-level characteristics (e.g., degree of caseworker specialization, quality of collaboration with other service fields) were associated with youths’ frequency and scope of ILP utilization.

Discussion and Contributions. We advance the literature on co-production and decision-making processes among youth in foster care in multiple ways. Using population data and representative data with high response rates, we offer rare empirical evidence demonstrating the roles of co-production (e.g., TILP development) on youths’ service utilization. We also highlight the importance of administrative context (county-level circumstances) in co-production and service use, which is an understudied area. Our study findings underscore the importance of involving youth in their TILP development, training providers to work collaboratively with youth in making decisions about their lives, and aiming to reduce county-level variation in TILP and ILP practices.