Out-of-home placement of children with severe handicaps: a comparison of approaches

Area of Science:

• Child Psychology
• Developmental Disabilities Research
• Social Work and Public Policy

Background:

• Understanding factors influencing out-of-home placement is crucial for child welfare.
• Previous research often relied on cross-sectional data, potentially overemphasizing certain risk factors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the relationship between various risk factors and out-of-home placement for children with severe and profound mental retardation.
• To compare findings from cross-sectional and semi-longitudinal study designs.

Main Methods:

• Utilized two research designs: a large cross-sectional study (n=5,992) and a smaller 2-panel semi-longitudinal study (n=141).
• Assessed predictor variables including age, sex, ethnicity, adaptive and maladaptive behaviors, intellectual disability level, and co-occurring conditions like blindness, deafness, and epilepsy.
• Employed multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to compare the importance of predictor variables across different sampling approaches.

Main Results:

• Significant differences were found in the relative importance of predictor variables depending on the sampling approach.
• Predictive accuracy for out-of-home placement showed only a marginal increase from the semi-longitudinal (70.2%) to the cross-sectional (72.2%) design.
• Ethnicity emerged as a potentially more significant factor in placement decisions than suggested by prior cross-sectional analyses.

Conclusions:

• Findings suggest that factors like age, adaptive behavior, and maladaptive behavior might be overemphasized in large, cross-sectional studies of child placement.
• Ethnicity may play a more substantial role in out-of-home placement decisions for children with severe and profound mental retardation than previously recognized.
• The study highlights the need for careful consideration of research design when evaluating risk factors for child placement.