Caseworker documentation of mothers in foster care: A case study in California.

BACKGROUND: Young people in foster care frequently experience early parenting, and U.S. law requires the documentation of parents in care. The extent to which the child protection system (CPS) has accurately collected information on parents in care remains largely unknown and has ramifications for the planning and delivery of services. OBJECTIVE: Using California as a case study, this study documented young mothers in care using birth records, determined the proportion of mothers correctly identified in CPS records, and compared characteristics and placements of mothers who were or were not identified. POPULATION: All mothers aged 15-21 years documented by vital birth records (2014 and 2019) were probabilistically linked to CPS records, yielding 3199 mothers in care. METHOD: We compared mothers who were or were not identified in CPS records using bivariate statistics. A chi-square test for trends examined differences in documentation over time. RESULTS: A third of mothers were not identified as such in CPS records (n = 1136). The proportion of mothers identified by caseworkers rose from 50 % in 2014 to 71.5 % in 2019 (p < .001). Nonminor dependent mothers and those placed in supervised independent living programs were more likely to be misclassified in CPS data. CONCLUSIONS: Motherhood may not be documented in CPS records; however, significant improvements were evident. Results suggest that all nonminor dependents should be informed of available services for expectant and parenting individuals, especially if they are living in less restrictive placements, given they are more likely to give birth and less likely to be identified in CPS records than minor dependents.

Drug Use, the Drug Environment, and Child Physical Abuse and Neglect.

Although drug use is considered a risk factor for child maltreatment, very little work has examined how the drug environment may affect physical abuse and neglect by parents. Utilizing information from a telephone survey with 2,597 respondents from 43 cities with valid police data on narcotics incidents, we analyzed the relationship between drug use, drug availability, and child maltreatment using multilevel models. City-level rates of drug abuse and dependence were related to more frequent physical abuse. Parents who use drugs in areas with greater availability of drugs reported more physical abuse and physical neglect. Emotional support was protective of all types of maltreatment. While most child welfare interventions focus on reducing parental drug use in order to reduce child abuse, these findings suggest environmental prevention or neighborhood strengthening approaches designed to reduce the supply of illicit drugs may also reduce child abuse through multiple mechanisms.

Building an Evidence-Driven Child Welfare Workforce: A University-Agency Partnership.

The federal government increasingly expects child welfare systems to be more responsive to the needs of their local populations, connect strategies to results, and use continuous quality improvement (CQI) to accomplish these goals. A method for improving decision making, CQI relies on an inflow of high-quality data, up-to-date research evidence, and a robust organizational structure and climate that supports the deliberate use of evidence for decision making. This article describes an effort to build and support these essential system components through one public-private child welfare agency-university partnership.

Building Analytic Capacity and Statistical Literacy Among Title IV-E MSW Students.

Building and sustaining effective child welfare practice requires an infrastructure of social work professionals trained to use data to identify target populations, connect interventions to outcomes, adapt practice to varying contexts and dynamic populations, and assess their own effectiveness. Increasingly, public agencies are implementing models of self-assessment in which administrative data are used to guide and continuously evaluate the implementation of programs and policies. The research curriculum described in the article was developed to provide Title IV-E and other students interested in public child welfare systems with hands-on opportunities to become experienced and "statistically literate" users of aggregated public child welfare data from California's administrative child welfare system, attending to the often missing link between data/research and practice improvement.