Foster Kinship’s Navigator Program: A Mix-Methods Study Evaluating Program Fidelity and Outcome Effectiveness

Background and Purpose: Research has found that only 27% of children in the US foster care system resided in kinship placements. To increase this surprisingly low percentage, the federal government has recently instituted strong legislative and financial incentives (i.e., Families First Prevention Services Act) designed to encourage states to 1) pursue relative placements as their primary placement options and 2) offer social services, such as kinship navigator programs, that provide both tangible and intangible resources to relative caregivers. These recommendations are grounded in the belief that children placed with relatives, who receive support from kinship navigator programs, experience better well-being and permanency outcomes than children placed in traditional foster care.

Few studies, however, have empirically investigated this assumption using a quasi-experimental research design. Moreover, no study has also established fidelity to a Navigator Program’s manual when performing this more rigorous type of study. The present study addressed this gap in the kinship care research by conducting a mix-methods study of a kinship navigator program located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Hypotheses tested were derived from transaction cost analyses and theories of perceived control:

H1. The intervention group will be statistically and significantly more likely to become licensed

than the comparison group.

H2. The intervention group will be statistically and significantly less likely to experience a

placement disruption than the comparison group.

H3. The intervention group will be statistically and significantly more likely to access

community services than the comparison group.

Methods: This mix-methods study consisted of a fidelity and outcome evaluation. The fidelity evaluation involved observing intake and case management staff on two separate occasions. An agency-specific rubric was developed to determine staffs’ level of fidelity to the Foster Kinship manual. The outcome evaluation used a quasi-experimental research design. Retrospective administrative data for all criterion, predictor, and control variables was from July 1^st, 2016 to June 30^th, 2019. This secondary data was collected from two sources, the State of Nevada’s Division of Family Services and the nonprofit agency Foster Kinship. Intervention and comparison groups (n = 558) were created using propensity score matching in R-studio version 1.2.5033. Hypotheses were tested using multivariate logistic regression in SPSS 24.0.

Results: Overall fidelity to Foster Kinship’s Navigator Program manual was 96% or 260 out of 270 possible tasks. Balance scores from the propensity matching process demonstrated baseline equivalence between the intervention and comparison groups across all matching variables. Multivariate logistic regression results supported all three hypotheses. The intervention group was 3.40 times more likely to become licensed, 2.99 times less likely to experience a placement disruption, and 1.71 times more likely to receive Child-Only TANF than the comparison group.

Conclusion and Implications: This is the first known study to demonstrate that fidelity to a Navigator Programs manual can yield superior outcomes for families than traditional foster care using a quasi-experimental research design. Theory and data suggest I&R services should be coupled with case management. Future research should attempt to extend this finding to other outcomes using a more rigorous randomized control trial research design.