Geographic Inequities in Child Welfare Permanency: A Rural-Urban-Mixed Analysis

Geography has received increasing attention from child welfare researchers. A growing body of research demonstrates that child welfare involvement differs systematically across rural and urban contexts. Beyond initial involvement, this study examines geospatial disparities in permanency outcomes and the moderation effect of race. Using data from AFCARS, we followed a cohort of children who entered foster care in FY 2016 and tracked their permanency outcomes through FY 2019. We conducted two sets of multinomial logistic regression analyses with and without the reunification group, respectively. We found that children in rural and nonmetropolitan urban areas had an increased likelihood of guardianship than their peers in large metropolitan urban areas. However, after taking children who reunified out of the sample, children in rural areas also had a higher likelihood of having a non-permanent exit than their peers in large metropolitan urban areas. Findings from our study also showed that race/ethnicity moderated the relationship between urbanicity/rurality and permanency.