Session: Poverty, Social Disadvantage, and Child Welfare Involvement: Interconnections Among Communities, Families, and Service Providers (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

Current popular narratives oversimplify the relationship between poverty and child welfare system (CWS) involvement. On average, families encountering the CWS have lower incomes, and rates of CWS involvement are highest in places with the highest concentrations of families with incomes below the poverty level. Among those involved with child welfare services, co-occurring conditions such as substance misuse and mental health challenges, which hardships exacerbate, also correlate with CWS involvement regardless of income. This co-mingling of potential causes makes the singular role of poverty difficult to pinpoint. This symposium newly examines the relationship between poverty and CWS involvement, offering better measurement precision and integrating qualitative and administrative data sources. We divide the symposium into three papers. For the first paper, we assessed poverty and CWS involvement at the community level using an ecological lens and added social disadvantage as a construct with broader dimensionality than poverty. With a large city's community districts (CDs) serving as the unit of analysis, we asked whether contact with the CWS is correlated with poverty and social disadvantage. The second paper involves interviews with families involved with the CWS. We asked parents about their hardship and its role in their involvement with the CWS. The third paper involves staff of prevention service agencies that work directly with families. We asked service providers how they see poverty as a factor that influences their approach to serving families. The papers are closely related. We determined the population-level risk of involvement using social indicators correlated with CWS contact. We spoke with families who were living in CDs where the rates of contact with the CWS were high. We spoke with providers delivering family support services those same CDs. To describe CWS involvement, we adopted a definition that splits the CWS into two primary functions. The child protection function includes reports, investigations, and report dispositions (substantiated or not); referrals to services that address issues raised during the investigation; and foster care placement when warranted. The services function includes community and self-referrals to services designed to avoid involvement with child protection (i.e., services offered before any other involvement with the child protection side of the CWS). The services may be similar, if not identical, to the services offered postinvestigation. The distinction rests on whether there was involvement with the child protection function before services were offered. The study set out to describe some of the hardships, CWS experiences, and community conditions of families known to the CWS. Understanding if, when, and how community context interacts with services and CWS experiences can bring us closer to knowing how the CWS can better support families and communities before they reach CPS. This knowledge can help policymakers understand how to alleviate the hardships that lead to the CWS's front door. When doing so, it is important to first note that communities have protective capacities that help families manage the challenge of raising children. Investments that target those protective capacities are a starting point and we discuss areas for future policy and research attention.