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Ensuring the wellbeing and stability of children with foster care experiences is critical. Between 5% and 20% of children experience post-permanency instability, a reentry into foster care after ad...

About 30% of children referred to child protective services each year in the US experience recurring maltreatment. Maltreatment has been linked to a myriad of negative developmental outcomes for ch...

This study explored data obtained from surveys of caregivers who had previously adopted or assumed guardianship of a child from foster care in two U.S. states (N= 937). Descriptive analyses summari...

Targeted prevention efforts after adoption or guardianship from foster care are intended to help families most at-risk and prior to the onset of significant issues. Most adoptive and guardianship f...

Children who have been adopted are more likely to have mental health diagnoses than non-adopted peers and may be overrepresented in residential treatment centers (RTCs). Yet, few studies have exami...

As many as one third of children who reunify from child welfare systems reenter care because of continued child maltreatment. This can have long-term deleterious effects on mental health. Yet, few studies have examined interventions that have been effective in promoting successful reunification or reunification that does not result in recidivism. This study presents findings from a systematic review of interventions that target successful reunification. We searched five academic databases, governmental and educational websites to identify prior literature. Three researchers extracted data from N = 216 studies retrieved and screened in 10 that met all inclusion criteria. However, small sample sizes, lack of replication of studies, and small effect sizes limit the generalizability of findings. As such, the findings from this review highlight a need for more rigorous studies to build the evidence base of post-permanence interventions for families that reunify.

Founded in 1994, the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) is social work’s scientific society, widely recognized as the world’s foremost venue for scientific exchange, advancement, a...

Independent living programs (ILP) are designed to increase positive outcomes for foster youth aging out of care in the various aspects of life such as education, employment, and housing. The purpose of this scoping review is to assess the effectiveness of independent living programs on educational outcomes among youths aging out of the foster care system in United States. A literature search was conducted among databases and dissertation abstracts. Publication dates of studies were restricted to 2005 to 2018. Language was restricted to English. Eleven articles were included in this review. Thematic findings included constant placement changes impacted educational outcomes, housing considerations should be paired with education, acknowledging individual youth characteristics is important as well as encouraging youth to participate as early as possible. The implications for agency practices and policies are also discussed in the study.

Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander populations are usually underrepresented in public child welfare systems. However, they are overrepresented in some state child welfare systems. Disproportionality and disparities exist with factors such as reluctance to use services, lack of visibility to professionals, lack of access to bilingual services, and biased systemic practices as contributing factors. Strategies to improve data documentation, to have less biased and stereotyped approaches, and to practice with cultural humility are recommended.

This article describes how implementation science and intervention research guided the process of selecting and implementing an evidence-informed intervention (Tuning in to Teens; TINT). TINT was provided as a selective prevention effort offered to families with youth aged 10 to 13 years old, with characteristics that suggest an elevated risk for post-permanency discontinuity. Usability testing findings: Contact was made with 54% of families, and 12% participated in the intervention. Multivariate results found no statistically significant differences between families who responded to outreach efforts and those who did not; families who participated in TINT and those who did not.Large public child welfare systems wanting to implement evidence-informed interventions can follow the steps detailed in this paper for selecting, adapting and implementing an intervention. Further, providers that seek to offer post adoption and guardianship services, a growing service need, may gain some insights into activities that promote service usage with this population.

Purpose: This study examines foster care reentry after adoption, in Illinois and New Jersey. The provision of services and supports to adoptive families have garnered recent attention due to concern about the long-term stability of adoptive homes. Method: This study used administrative data to examine the pre-adoption characteristics associated with post-adoption foster care reentry. Children were tracked longitudinally, using administrative data, for five to fifteen years (depending on their date of adoption), or the age of majority. Results: Results indicated that most (95%) children did not reenter foster care after adoption. Findings from survival models suggested key covariates that may help to identify children most at risk for post-adoption reentry: child race, age at adoption, number of placement moves in foster care, and time spent in foster care prior to adoption. Conclusion: Study findings may help identify families most at-risk for post-adoption difficulties in order to develop preventative adoption service.

Although children who have been adopted are referred for mental health services more often than their non-adopted peers and might be overrepresented within residential treatment centers (RTCs), little is known about adoptive families' experiences with RTCs. The present study sought to understand the experiences of families whose children were placed in residential treatment facilities after a finalized adoption. Qualitative interviews were conducted with a total of ten families who had adopted 21 children. Of these, 13 children had been placed in an RTC after the finalized adoption. Most of the children in the sample were between zero and five years of age at placement. Adoptive families reported the need for in-the-trenches training and community-based services that could provide ongoing support post-adoption. Implications from these findings include increasing in-home services and other options within the adoptive families' own communities. Future research could incorporate a larger sample to as...

For nearly four decades, child welfare policy and practice have focused on the achievement of legal permanence for children in foster care. Although federal child welfare policy has resulted in the movement of children from state custody to legally permanent adoptive or guardianship families, little is known about the quality and enduring nature of these placements. A significant challenge of the twenty-first century child welfare system is how to ensure the well-being of children currently living with adoptive parents or guardians. This paper discusses child welfare policy and trends related to post-permanency well-being, including the decrease in Title IV-E foster care caseloads nationwide and the simultaneous increase in Title IV-E adoptive and guardianship caseloads. We highlight the needs of a twenty-first century child welfare system, including increased federal efforts to ensure child permanence and well-being after legal adoption or guardianship has been achieved, as well as more rigorous longitudinal and interdisciplinary research focused on the post-permanency adjustment of children and their families.

The Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative (GCSWI) reflects the power and potential of social work to accelerate social innovations and resolve major social problems. The complexity of these societal problems mandates profession-wide entrepreneurial readiness to engage in transdisciplinary, interprofessional, and translational collaborations. The GCSWI galvanizes shifts in undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, and early career supports to equip social work graduates at all levels to design, test, disseminate, and sustain innovative solutions. This paper describes the relevance of the GCSWI to professional education and suggests the collective-impact model as a heuristic for professional preparation to collaborate in grand challenge contexts. This paper also describes the pedagogical thinking underlying a T-shaped professional and the logic behind translational and innovation meta-competencies as pipeline connections across grand challenges, disciplinary partners, and stakeholder involvement. In ...

The American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) is a scholarly and professional society of distinguished of social work and social welfare scholars and practitioners that was conceived in 2009 to establish excellence in social work and social welfare research and practice. The first 10 Fellows were inducted in 2010 and a total of 172 Fellows have been inducted since that year. Nominations are solicited from current Fellows, processed through a Nominations and Elections Committee process, and voted on by the membership. Through committee structure and an expanding, and now independent, practical initiative called the Grand Challenges for Social Work that was the Academy’s first initiative, the Academy serves to advance social welfare through advocacy and policy and to encourage scholarship, along with expanding the reach of the Academy Fellows’ expertise into critical government and public forums. The AASWSW s in its second-year of administering a mentoring program to provide expertise and resources for early career faculty through Fellows who volunteer as mentors for specific projects like a grant application or research manuscript. Future Academy endeavors include awards for innovation and impact in research or practice, sponsoring policy briefs, often in conjunction with other academies, and serving as a relevant source of information for the social work profession.

This chapter reviews American immigration policy, specifically focusing on policies that have an impact on Chinese children and families. It describes the several different kinds of Chinese children and families in the United States. The chapter discusses the core values that all Chinese Americans share, presents some of the problems Chinese immigrant children and families have had in the United States. It discusses how the immigration policies have had an impact upon the problems of Chinese parents and children, and proposes future recommendations to address these problems. Eldest sons in traditional Chinese families are obligated to take care of the elders, carry on the family name, and meet all the obligations of family leadership. The predominance of family and the value placed on avoiding loss of face applies to the Chinese children as well as the adults. Immigration policy has shaped the lives of Chinese Americans powerfully and for several generations.

In order to address the number of children entering the foster care system each year and to promote the family's participation in the decision-making process, family-centered meetings have been widely adopted throughout the United States as well as in other countries. Since 1989, Family Group Conferencing, Family Group Decision Making, and Family Team Meetings have all been introduced into public child welfare systems. This paper will refer to all three approaches as family-centered meetings. However, little empirical research has been done to test the impact of these meetings on families referred to Child Protective Services (CPS). This paper examines literature on the impact of family-centered meetings with families referred to CPS on child and family functioning outcomes. The results suggest that more research is needed to examine fidelity models and specific types of interventions being implemented. However, all of these three appear to increase kinship care placements. More research is needed, specifically regarding the contexts where family-centered interventions could be appropriate. Implications for practice are also discussed, with special consideration of integrating family-centered interventions with other interventions to promote both family participation and child safety.

In 2012, the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare launched an initiative to identify “ambitious yet achievable goals for society” that can guide the direction of social work in the next decade and help build concerted efforts to confront emerging social problems. We describe the development of the Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative, including a model for achieving far-reaching impact on deeply significant problems, and outline strategies for maximizing policy involvement in this endeavor through social work education, community engagement, legislative advocacy, and national initiative involvement. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Policy Conference 2.0 held in Austin, Texas on May 29–31, 2014.

A history of transracial and intercountry adoptions in the United States is briefly provided as well as highlights trends, demographics, practices, and policies that have evolved as families have become more diverse. The current prevalence of intercountry and transracial adoptions in the United States is examined as well as the impact of policy changes in the United States and abroad on rates of intercountry adoption. Additionally, the challenges that have emerged for children adopted transracially and from abroad, as well as for their adoptive families, are reviewed. These include navigating ethnic and racial identity formation, cultural sensitivity, and challenging behaviors. Finally, future directions for social work practice, research, and policy are explored, and implications are provided for social workers intervening with families who have adopted children transracially or internationally. Specifically, adoption-competent professionals should also integrate cultural humility and competence into their therapeutic work with adoptive children and families. Implications for research in the conclusion focus on expanding prior studies on intercountry and transracial adoptions to incorporate racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in the literature. Policy implications include increasing access and funding for post-adoption services for all adoptive families.

This chapter describes the evolution of social work science in relationship to the development of the Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative. The two initiatives, which took root in the field in close to the same period, created a mutually supportive, synergistic environment that benefitted both. Social work science, grounded in critical realism, embraces methodological approaches supportive of the fundamental principles of the social work profession and contributes to both the scientific identity needed for the stewards of the profession of social work and the scientific pipeline for the Grand Challenges for Social Work. An initiative of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, the Grand Challenges for Social Work delineate bold innovations and collective action powered by proven and evolving scientific interventions to address critical social issues facing society today. This chapter discusses how this work helps to both develop and derive support from social work science.

A plethora of research has linked exposure to violence during childhood to negative long-term physical health, mental health, and risk behavior outcomes. Yet, despite estimates that up to 60% of children in the United States will be exposed to violence, little is known about the impact on adult life satisfaction among different racial and ethnic groups, or for different types of violence exposure. This article seeks to explore factors that are associated with life satisfaction in adults who were exposed to family violence or physically abused as a child, while adjusting race, ethnicity, gender, and emotional support. Employing data from the 2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), links are examined between childhood exposure to violence and adult life satisfaction. For this study, noninstitutionalized adults aged 18 and above in the United States were included. Adults who reported exposure to physical abuse as a child had lower odds of reporting life satisfaction, and those with both physical abuse and interpersonal violence exposure had the lowest odds of long-term life satisfaction. Higher levels of income, emotional support, and marriage were associated with higher levels of satisfaction for both adults who were not exposed to violence as children and those who were. After controlling for sociodemographic factors, adults who identified as Asian or Pacific Islander had higher odds of reporting life satisfaction than their Caucasian counterparts. Implications from these findings include targeting interventions to increase emotional support and social networks for individuals who have been exposed to violence.

The Grand Challenges for Social Work (GCSW) focuses on big, important and compelling problems for all of American society. Sponsored by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, the 12 Grand Challenges address issues of healthy youth development, the health gap, family violence, long and productive lives, social isolation, homelessness, changing climate environments, technology for social good, smart decarceration, economic inequity, financial capacity, and equal opportunity and justice. GCSW is designed to promote scientific and transformative innovation in social work, engage the social work profession in strengthening the ties among social work organizations, foster transdisciplinary research, create greater acknowledgement of social work science within the discipline and by other and related disciplines, and expand the student pipeline into the social work profession.

The Grand Challenges have spawned involvement and action in many ways—most notably through a network for each of the 12 Grand Challenges. The networks are flexibly organized, are co-led or multiply-led, and include leading scholars, junior scholars, doctoral students, MSW students, BSW students, and practitioners. Multiple national organizations, including the National Association of Social Workers, the Council on Social Work Education, and the Society for Social Work and Research are using their national and regional conferences and newsletters to spread information about the grand challenges and to help the profession organize around them. Special issues of journals and volumes of books about the grand challenges are lifting up the scholarship and universities are adopting some or all of the grand challenges to focus on solving major social problems.

Crisis is the turning point at which things will either get better or get worse.… In Chinese, the word “crisis” is made up of characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” Resettlement is such a risk and opportunity.

Concurrent with the decline in intercountry adoption, there has been an increase in commercial global surrogacy over the past decade, but no international law yet exists to reconcile conflicting national laws and protect the interests of infant/child, surrogate mother, and commissioning parent(s). Previous discussion has focused on the vulnerability of the surrogate mothers and insufficient attention has been given to the best interests of the child, despite the fact that some children have been left stateless for years as a result of conflicting policies. Using the principles of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, social workers and policy makers should advocate for the development of international law to regulate commercial global surrogacy in order to prevent children’s rights violations and act in the best interests of the child.

Research suggests that up to one-third of children who reunify re-enter care because of continued maltreatment. For young children, this is particularly detrimental due to rapid brain development during the first years of life.This study examined family- and state child welfare system predictors of successful reunification, or reunification with no reentries into foster care.A sample of N=53,789 from the 2012 Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System of children ages zero-to-five who reunified was utilized. Children were tracked over the following three years and a multilevel model was run to compare family- and state system-factors among those that successfully and unsuccessfully reunified.Only 4.6 % of the variance in successful reunification was at the state child welfare system level. After adjusting for family-factors, state average time-to-reunify (OR=1.04, p.05) and violent crime rates (OR=1.00, p.01) were associated with successful reunification. A random effect for race and ethnicity and parental drug use suggests that the relationship between race and ethnicity and successful reunification, and parental drug use and successful reunification, varies significantly by state child welfare system.Given these findings, practitioners and child welfare agencies should prioritize family-centered interventions. Future research could identify which state child welfare systems have successfully improved outcomes for families of color and families with histories of drug abuse.

Married couples who adopt older children from foster care, especially children with special needs, can often face unique marital stressors. This article explores strategies for strengthening marria...

Social work education grounded in social work practice has been recently challenged to examine the role of science in its history, core constructs and domains, philosophical underpinnings, and graduate curriculum. Doctoral education has been added to the scrutiny at the recent Science in Social Work Roundtable in Doctoral Education. Based on Lev Vygotsky’s scaffolding approach to facilitate learning, this article discusses doctoral student education with the four stages of (1) positioning doctoral students for a scientific career, (2) promoting doctoral students as scholars of the academy, (3) promulgating doctoral students as scientists of the profession, and (4) preparing doctoral student to be stewards of the discipline.

This study describes the marriage and family relationships of refugees as they transition through resettlement. Through in-depth interviews with 31 refugees representing 12 countries, participants describe their lives and experiences in their own “voices.” The findings reflect two broad themes that either support or impede self-sufficiency: (1) the internal or intimate dynamics of refugee lives, and (2) external and systems dynamics. Qualitative data analysis procedures yield findings that illuminated strengths of refugees, the challenges that they face, and suggestions for informative and responsive policy and program changes based on this knowledge.

This invited article introduces the concept of grand challenges—ambitious yet achievable goals for society that mobilize the profession, capture the public’s imagination, and require innovation and breakthroughs in science and practice to achieve (Kalil, 2012). We call for broad and deep participation of social work scientists and practitioners in the Grand Challenges for Social Work initiative, which will be coordinated by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.