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Placement decisions and disparities among aboriginal groups: an application of the decision making ecology through
John D Fluke1, Martin Chabot, Barbara Fallon
1Child Protection Research Center, American Humane Association, Centennial, CO, USA.
Insights
Organizational factors, not just clinical ones, influence child placement decisions. Agencies with more reports concerning Aboriginal children showed higher placement rates, suggesting resource disparities contribute to overrepresentation in foster care.
Area of Science:
- Child Welfare Studies
- Sociology of Family
- Public Health Policy
Background:
- Child maltreatment investigations can lead to out-of-home care placements.
- Disparities exist in placement rates for Aboriginal children in Canada.
- Organizational factors may influence child welfare decisions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the influence of clinical and organizational factors on out-of-home care decisions.
- To test if organizational characteristics impact placement decisions.
- To identify factors contributing to disparities in placement decisions for Aboriginal children.
Main Methods:
- Utilized data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect.
- Analyzed nearly 5,000 child maltreatment investigations.
- Employed multi-level statistical models with logistic link functions in MPlus software.
Main Results:
- The number of Aboriginal reports an organization received was a significant predictor of placement decisions.
- This organizational factor remained consistent across varying caseload representations.
- No other second-level factors were significant predictors in the final model.
Conclusions:
- Agency-level disparities were identified in child welfare decision-making for Aboriginal children.
- Lack of agency or community resources may contribute to the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in foster care.
Objective:
This paper examined the relative influence of clinical and organizational characteristics on the decision to place a child in out-of-home care at the conclusion of a child maltreatment investigation. It tested the hypothesis that extraneous factors, specifically, organizational characteristics, impact the decision to place a child in out-of-home care. A secondary aim was to identify possible decision making influences related to disparities in placement decisions tied to Aboriginal children. Research suggests that the Aboriginal status of the child and structural risk factors affecting the family, such as poverty and poor housing, substantially account for this overrepresentation.
Methods:
The decision to place a child in out-of-home care was examined using data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect. This child welfare dataset collected information about the results of nearly 5,000 child maltreatment investigations as well as a description of the characteristics of the workers and organization responsible for conducting those investigations. Multi-level statistical models were developed using MPlus software, which can accommodate dichotomous outcome variables, which are more reflective of decision making in child welfare. MPlus allows the specific case of the logistic link function for binary outcome variables under maximum likelihood estimation.
Results:
Final models revealed the importance of the number of Aboriginal reports to an organization as a key second level predictor of the placement decision. It is the only second level factor that remains in the final model. This finding was very stable when tested over several different levels of proportionate caseload representation ranging from greater than 50% to 20% of the caseload.
Conclusions:
Disparities among Aboriginal children in child welfare decision making were identified at the agency level.
Practice Implications:
The study provides additional evidence supporting the possibility that one source of overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in the Canadian foster care system is a lack of appropriate resources at the agency or community level.
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