Today’s guest blogger is Shea Gregory
This 2015 study, conducted by Sarah A. Font of the University of Texas at Austin Population Research Center, examines the circumstances surrounding stability of kinship placements. Using data from the state of Wisconsin, this study goes beyond exploring whether kinship care placements (KC) are more stable than non-relative foster care (NRFC), as many other researchers have done, and explores the factors that cause kinship placements to be more stable, specifically order of placement, policy preference for kinship placements, and factors specific to the child.
Three significant findings were made, the first being that youth who were initially placed in shelter placement before being moved to KC had an 18% higher risk of placement change than youth who were initially placed in shelter and then in NRFC, but that this pattern only holds for two months. This implies that for high-risk youth NRFC placements have a lower risk of disruption than in KC placements. The second finding was that youth in KC have a 33% lower probability in the first two months and a 20% lower risk after two months of a foster-parent requested move compared to youth in NRFC. This implies that there may be factors specific to kinship caregivers and the children that they care for that lead to lower risk of foster-parent requested moves. Lastly, it was found that children were most likely to experience subsequent placements of the same type and that youth in NRFC have a 40% lower probability in the first two months and a 35% lower probability after two months of experiencing a move to a less preferred placement when compared to youth in KC. This finding implies that youth who do experience disruptions in kinship placements will be more likely to go to a NRFC placement or another “less desirable placement” following the disruption of the KC placement.
Overall, the results of this study indicate that child-specific factors and policy preference for kinships do affect the risk of placement move for kids (Font, 2015). This suggests that the differences in the children entering foster care partly explain why we find higher stability in kinship care placements (Font, 2015). This implication opens up a new focus area for researchers: what specific child characteristics lead to more stable placements? Is kinship placement really the better option, or does it appear as such because policy promotes it and the kids going into kinship placements have characteristics that allow for better stability? Further exploration into these questions could allow us to have a greater understanding about what makes out-of-home placements work for kids.
Work Cited: Font, S. A. (2015). Is higher placement stability in kinship foster care by virtue or design? Child Abuse & Neglect, 42, 99-111.