Poverty, Social Disadvantage, and Child Welfare Involvement: A Community-Level Perspective for Action

Background and Purpose

Child welfare systems (CWS) have been shifting focus upstream to prevent child protection system (CPS) involvement and doing so requires a better understanding of the reasons families become involved with the system. This study explored the interconnectedness of family challenges, CWS involvement, and community conditions. Our goal was to understand how community context influences families' experiences with services and child welfare system involvement, ultimately informing strategies for earlier and more effective support. The study introduces two key innovations. First, unlike much prior research that centers on children with a history of CPS investigation, we analyzed the experiences of children who were first referred to community prevention services before any contact with CPS. Second, we constructed longitudinal measures of social disadvantage at the community level to understand if, when, and how community context interacts with services and child welfare system experiences. This knowledge can help policymakers assess how to alleviate the hardships that lead to the child welfare system’s front door.

Methods

We constructed a unique database that organized contact with the services, maltreatment, and placement data as a sequence of events placed in temporal order. The temporal event structure allows us to identify two main types of trajectories for children and families: Trajectories associated with the services function that start with a community- or self-referral, and trajectories associated with the child protection function that start with an investigation. To assess the level of community hardship and its change over time, we constructed a social disadvantage index for each community district (CD) for two five-year periods. The index incorporates 17 indicators spanning various domains, including family structure, housing, and general economic conditions. Using random-effects longitudinal Poisson count models with the integrated longitudinal data, we investigated changes over time in community-level hardship; changes in the number of service referrals; changes in CPS investigations; changes in placements; and changes in child welfare service involvement given the other community-level changes.

Results

Our study results show that over time, child poverty decreased while social disadvantage remained relatively stable; social disadvantage has a stronger link with system involvement than poverty alone; per capita placement rates are highest in the districts with the highest and lowest levels of disadvantage; and the relationship between system involvement and disadvantage depends on race but in ways that are sometimes counterintuitive.

Conclusions and implications

Our findings underscore the significant impact of social disadvantage on CWS involvement. By adopting a longitudinal perspective and examining variation across NYC’s diverse communities, this study reveals the complex and evolving nature of this relationship, particularly in relation to racial disparities. This nuanced understanding provides a foundation for actionable insights that inform the development of targeted policies and interventions for practitioners and policymakers who want to reduce CWS involvement and strive for greater equity in child welfare.