| Child Welfare Research
for the 21st Century |
681 -- 683 |
| Jane Waldfogel |
|
In the past several years, increased attention
has been paid to child welfare research and the extent to which
it adequately addresses fundamental questions about the safety,
permanency, and well-being of children involved with the child
welfare system. To cite just a few examples of the activity in
this area: Congress has enacted several measures that prescribe
what data are to be gathered and what outcomes are to be
tracked, while the National Institute of Health and other
branches of the government have conducted major reviews of their
funding for research related to child abuse and neglect and have
issued major new calls for proposals to study child abuse and
neglect. |
|
|
|
| Children in Substitute
Care: Some Conceptual Considerations and Research
Implications |
685 -- 703 |
| Michael Rutter |
|
Children in substitute care have a much
increased rate of psychosocial problems but also they come from
high risk backgrounds. Risk and protective influences include:
genetic factors; physical traumata; preadmission psychosocial
experiences; experiences ‘in care’, and experiences after
leaving care. Interplay among these is usual. Follow-up studies
show the reality of resilience in the face of adversity but also
they indicate persistent sequelae in some cases in spite of
major environmental improvements. Key challenges for the present
and future are considered with respect to: societal responses to
parenting failure; adoption; family foster care; kinship foster
care; and residential group care. Mainstream research needs to
pay greater attention to policy and practice questions and
action research needs to take better advantage of improvements
in research methodology.
|
|
|
|
| Child Welfare Research:
How Adequate Are the Data? |
705 -- 741 |
| Jane Waldfogel |
|
This paper reviews new and existing datasets and outcome
measures for research on child welfare. The new federal database
(AFCARS) will provide a wealth of case-specific data about
children in placement, while enhanced state-level systems will
provide more extensive data on permanency and safety. State
administrative datasets are another resource, but even if pushed
to their limits, they will not provide adequate data to measure
outcomes for children in the areas of safety, permanency, and
well-being. In some instances, further progress can be made in
tracking safety and permanency in state administrative data.
However, additional data (from case records, interviews with
caseworkers, family members, and others) will be necessary to
understand the processes whereby children enter placement,
remain in placement, return home, move to permanent homes, or
return to placement again, and to assess child and family
well-being. There is also a need for follow-up studies, and
longitudinal population-based studies of children at risk of
placement or abuse or neglect. Therefore, this review suggests
that the next generation of studies should be longitudinal in
design. Moreover, to the extent that we are concerned about
children at risk, such studies will need to follow a broader
sample rather than just children in placement. |
|
|
|
| Research Needed to
Improve the Prospects for Children in Out-of-Home
Placement |
743 -- 761 |
| Mark E. Courtney |
|
This
paper identifies several priorities for organizing research that
is needed to significantly improve the prospects for children in
out-of-home care. These priorities include (1) program
evaluation research on services provided to children in
out-of-home care, (2) organizational studies of various aspects
of the child welfare system and the relationships between child
welfare services and other systems, (3) research on child
welfare decision making, (4) examination of the role of race and
ethnicity in outcomes of care, and (5) attention to recurring
methodological issues. Accomplishing this research agenda will
most likely require a sustained federal commitment to funding
research on out-of-home care.
|
|
|
|
| Outcomes After Child
Welfare Services: Implications for the Design of
Performance Measures |
763 -- 787 |
| Richard P. Barth, Melissa Jonson-Reid |
|
Reinvigorated efforts to develop performance
measures for child welfare services have largely ignored a
critical aspect of child welfare outcomes—what happens to
children after their involvement with child welfare services
ends. The authors present data from studies of post-child
welfare services mortality and incarceration to indicate the
vital need to incorporate information about post-child welfare
services into a broad research agenda and into performance
measures. Specific recommendations are advanced about the
inclusion of safety indicators in performance indicator schemes.
|
|
|
|
| Child Welfare Outcomes
Revisited |
789 -- 810 |
| John Poertner, Thomas P. McDonald, Cyndie
Murray |
|
The use of outcome measures in
child welfare has been part of agency and academic discussions for at
least two decades. In 1989, McDonald, Lieberman, Poertner and Hornby
contributed to the implementation of an outcome focus through the
publication of “Child Welfare Standards for Success.” That paper
presented the results of a comprehensive review of published and
unpublished research that reported on outcomes of the major public child
welfare programs: protective services, substitute care and adoption. The
purpose of this paper is to revisit the field to gather additional
outcome studies and to determine if broader agreement can be reached on
both the definitions of outcome measures and standards for evaluating
success. Discussion is included on issues of the use of outcome data for
management decision-making, court monitoring, and community involvement.
|
