Substitute care in Tennessee: a study of placement instability

The number of children removed from home and placed in foster care is large and growing. While foster care and other out-of-home placements are, by nature, designed to be temporary, many children in substitute care experience recurrent moves (termed "replacements" or "disruptions").Placement instability routinely thwarts the permanency planning efforts mandated by current laws and agency policies. Identifying replacement risk factors has been difficult due to methodological limitations. Oftentimes Nonprobability samples have been used, risk factors have been limited to demographic variables and constructs assessed using measures of unknown reliability and validity,and statistical methods have been used that do not adequately account for the distributional characteristics of replacement. To date, few factors, such as child age and the presence of emotional/behavioral problems, have been linked consistently to replacement risk. The study was divided into two portions. The first portion examined an extensive array of replacement risk factors, among a random sample of 658 Tennessee children in state custody, usingNegative Binomial Regression, a statistical procedure more appropriate than those previously used for analyzing replacement. Risk factor and replacement data were collected using record reviews and, more importantly,personal interviews with multiple sources {e.e. children,parent, workers, teachers). Teams under the auspices of theTennessee Commission on Children and Youth collected these data as part of an annual review to determine how well system functions were carried out in serving children and families. Information was augmented using data collectedfrom an administrative data base maintained by the TennesseeDepartment of Children's Services. The second portion of this study attempts to take disruption research a stepbeyond what has been achieved in previous studies by providing a proposed framework by which to understand replacement and by testing this framework in an exploratory manner.