Browsing by Subject "Child protection"
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Item Evaluating the differential response approach in child protection : a systematic review of the evidence(2019-08-09) Traish, Nawal Murjana; Osborne, Cynthia Anne, 1969-In U.S. Fiscal Year 2017, states responded to 2.4 million calls reporting child abuse or neglect, spanning from inadequate supervision to severe physical maltreatment (U.S. Children’s Bureau, 2017). Since the mid-1990s, child welfare reformers have increasingly acknowledged that such a volume of reports warrants a wider, more flexible range of interventions than the standard fact-finding investigation. Today, the majority of states offer at least two distinct responses to child maltreatment reports through an approach known as Differential Response (DR). Despite the rapid proliferation of DR over the past two decades, critics have charged that it does not keep children as safe as traditional one-track systems, and some states have discontinued their pilot programs after mixed results. This report takes a systematic review approach to identify and assess the most rigorous published studies examining DR’s impact on child maltreatment recidivism. The balance of evidence supports the claim that DR, and in particular the Alternative Response (AR) track, has kept children equally as safe, or safer, than their counterparts served by the traditional investigative response. Qualitative research has also revealed that caregivers receive the Alternative Response intervention more positively than the traditional investigation. The report identifies key differences in jurisdictions’ implementation of DR that have led to varying levels of success and offers policy and practice recommendations based on state and county practices that have yielded the best outcomes. Disparate research methodologies also contributed to different findings on child safety outcomes. The report recommends more consistent analytic strategies to make state DR evaluations comparable to one another and to build a stronger national consensus on the efficacy of the approachItem Long-term outcomes of child protection mediation on permanency for children in foster care(2010-08) Madden, Elissa Eichel; Schwab, A. James; McRoy, Ruth G.; Baumann, Donald; Busch-Armendariz, Noel; Travis, Dnika; Bryant, CynthiaDuring the past two decades, court and child welfare agency officials have begun to view the use of mediation in child protection cases as a logical and cost-effective approach to finding safe and mutually agreeable solutions to cases in a timely manner so that permanency can be established more quickly for children. While those who support the use of child protection mediation generally believe that the mediation process has a positive influence on permanency outcomes; few studies have attempted to examine the accuracy of these claims. Utilizing participant survey data from an evaluation of a pilot child protection mediation program implemented in 43 Texas counties, as well as case-level administrative data from Child Protective Services (CPS), the present study sought to address gaps in the existing literature by more closely examining the association between child protection mediation and permanency outcomes for children in foster care. In addition, this study examined the impact of parental engagement with the mediation process on permanency outcomes. Propensity Score Matching (PSM) was used to match 315 mediated cases with 315 non-mediated cases that were resolved through the traditional adversarial process (N=630). Descriptive bivariate analysis indicated that mediated cases varied significantly from non-mediated cases on several of the observed characteristics. Furthermore, the findings of this study indicate that neither participation in mediation nor parental engagement in the mediation process had a discernable effect on whether permanency was achieved or on children’s final placement outcomes. Interestingly, the use of mediation, as well as higher levels of parental engagement were both found to be associated with increased time to permanency. While the findings were somewhat counterintuitive, the results of this study suggest that the phenomena of permanency may be better explained not by one or two specific factors, but rather a combination of child, family, agency, court, and community factors that work together, and in some instances against each other, to influence the final permanency outcome. The findings of this study underscore the difficulty in measuring the impact of a single intervention on outcomes likely affected by a multitude of competing factors.