Session: Supporting Families and Preventing Future Child Welfare Involvement: The Promise of the Screened-out Landscape (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

Each year millions of reports of suspected maltreatment are made to Child Protection Service (CPS) agencies across the country. Of these approximately 50.5% are screened out or determined not to be eligible for a CPS intervention yet little is known about them. A few studies found that a significant number of families that are screened-out are re-reported within 5 years, representing a sizeable population of families brought to the attention of the child welfare system who could benefit from services to prevent future child welfare involvement (Putnam-Hornstein et al., 2015; Simon et al., 2022).

In 2023, the Doris Duke Foundation launched the OPT-In for Families Initiative with the goal of “creating and testing a meaningful alternative to the child welfare system�—one that focuses on screened-out families, based on the underlying theory that these reports are an important indicator of families who may become system-involved in the future if they do not receive services and supports.

Considering this strategic investment in supporting families reported and screened out by CPS, this symposium presents three research papers that inform the current landscape and design of community response (CR) programs aimed at preventing future system involvement. Using a variety of methods—quantitative, qualitative, and literature review—these papers collectively offer insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers on how best to support families who, while not currently system-involved, are considered at high risk of future CPS contact.

Methods: These three papers generate valuable insights on screened-out referrals and the opportunities to best serve families involved in these referrals. The first paper is a quantitative administrative data analysis. The second paper is a rapid literature review that provides a systematic review of the literature on CR programs, which serve families involved in a screened-out referral. The third paper is a qualitative study that uses community cafes, a Participatory Action Research approach, to generate insight from families and mandated reporters on how to design a program to avoid system involvement.

Results: The first paper uses state level administrative data to provide insight into the trends and trajectories of screened-out reports. That paper demonstrates that the population of screened-out children changed slightly from 2021 to 2023. Furthermore, multivariate analyses present evidence of important age and contextual variation in re-referral probabilities.

The rapid literature review (the second paper) identified varied success in CR programs achieving their intended outcomes. Additionally, the review finds that co-design with families is an area of opportunity to improve program design and implementation. The third paper highlights several components that families and mandated reporters identify as critical to creating a successful community-based program that engages families and supports them.

Conclusions and Implications: Collectively, these findings suggest that families involved in screened out reports are at risk of having future system involvement and that CR programs are an important preventative opportunity to avoid system involvement and support families in their communities. These findings also highlight ways in which programs can be designed and implemented to meaningfully engage and impact families.