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Project Description

Systems Reform/Child-Focused Family-Centered Practice Methodology: (Eight counties) Intervention includes providing services that emphasize the safety and best interests of the child by eliminating harm-causing factors. Services can include respite, in-kind assistance (e.g., furniture, clothing, utility payments), job training, medical care, transportation, child care, counseling, parental training, short-term financial assistance (90 days), and homemaker services. Eligible clients include children involved in the child welfare system as well as their parents, foster parents or potential foster parents, custodial relatives or potential custodial relatives, siblings, and adoptive or potential adoptive parents. Evaluation includes random assignment to experimental and control groups at a ratio of 1:3. The baseline sample size for the experimental group is estimated at 615 children, with an additional 63 children per month. Major goals are to increase relative placements for those children placed outside the home, increase placement of children and sibling groups in their home communities, decrease foster-care placements, decrease time in foster care, increase child well being, increase family preservation efforts to decrease foster care placements.

Project duration: Jan 1999 - Dec 2006

Sites studied include Mississippi (eight counties)

Sample Characteristics and Sites Studied

For the interim analysis:
n=376 families (194 experimental; 182 control)

Recent Findings in Brief

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