Child safety decisions and parental mental health problems: A new analysis of mediating factors.

Background: Our previous study showed that parents with mental health problems or substance abuse are at increased risk of having children removed from the home, primarily due to caregiving deficits, neglect, and prenatal exposure to substances, not physical abuse.

Objective: Using a larger sample and more rigorous analysis, the present study improves and expand upon the previous study, yielding more robust explanations for why these children are at increased risk of removal.

Participants And Setting: The study uses a sample of 4070 Structured Decision Making® assessments conducted by San Francisco's Child Welfare provider involving parents reported for the first time from 2007 to 2015.

Safely Increasing Connection to Community-Based Services: A Study of Multidisciplinary Team Decision Making for Child Welfare Referrals.

Initial child welfare screening decisions, traditionally made by an individual worker, determine if a family will receive further intervention by child protective services. A multi-disciplinary team (MDT) decision-making approach for child welfare referrals aims to provide a more thorough assessment of needs and strengths and to connect families to appropriate community-based providers. This study examined 159 child welfare referrals handled by MDTs compared to 331 referrals handled via the traditional screening approach.

Family homelessness, subsequent CWS involvement, and implications for targeting housing interventions to CWS-involved families.

Background: Homelessness is a risk factor for family involvement with child welfare services (CWS). Housing interventions are promising-but reasons for this are not well understood, and housing resources could be better targeted to families at risk of increased CWS involvement.

Objective: We sought to better understand the relationship between homelessness and CWS involvement and examine whether homeless shelter data could combine with CWS data to enhance intervention targeting.

Understanding child protection decisions involving parents with mental illness and substance abuse.

Among children investigated for maltreatment, those with parents experiencing mental illness or substance abuse are more likely to be placed out-of-home; however, little is known about why these children are at greater risk. Using a sample of 2488 Structured Decision Making assessments administered in San Francisco county from 2011 to 2015, we identified a profile of safety threats that accounts for why workers are more likely to determine children of parents with mental illness and/or substance abuse unsafe in the home. Eight percent of assessments in our sample involved parents with current mental illness only and 10% had comorbid substance abuse.

A Retrospective Examination of Child Protection Involvement Among Young Adults Accessing Homelessness Services.

Childhood maltreatment is associated with a variety of young adult adversities including homelessness. This study used linked administrative records to develop a population-level, epidemiological characterization of the child protection histories of young adults accessing homelessness services. The records of all 17- to 24-year-olds receiving homeless services between 2011 and 2014 in San Francisco County, California (n = 2241) were probabilistically linked to statewide child protective service (CPS) records.

Building Analytic Capacity and Statistical Literacy Among Title IV-E MSW Students.

Building and sustaining effective child welfare practice requires an infrastructure of social work professionals trained to use data to identify target populations, connect interventions to outcomes, adapt practice to varying contexts and dynamic populations, and assess their own effectiveness. Increasingly, public agencies are implementing models of self-assessment in which administrative data are used to guide and continuously evaluate the implementation of programs and policies. The research curriculum described in the article was developed to provide Title IV-E and other students interested in public child welfare systems with hands-on opportunities to become experienced and "statistically literate" users of aggregated public child welfare data from California's administrative child welfare system, attending to the often missing link between data/research and practice improvement.

Building an Evidence-Driven Child Welfare Workforce: A University-Agency Partnership.

The federal government increasingly expects child welfare systems to be more responsive to the needs of their local populations, connect strategies to results, and use continuous quality improvement (CQI) to accomplish these goals. A method for improving decision making, CQI relies on an inflow of high-quality data, up-to-date research evidence, and a robust organizational structure and climate that supports the deliberate use of evidence for decision making. This article describes an effort to build and support these essential system components through one public-private child welfare agency-university partnership.

A comparison of foster care entry risk at three spatial scales.

This study addresses the problem of operationalizing neighborhood boundaries by investigating foster care entry risk at three spatial scales. Foster care entries from a California county between 2000 and 2003 (n = 3,311) are geocoded to each of the three scales (N = 46 zip codes, 320 census tracts, and 983 block groups). Exploratory spatial data analysis is used to compare spatial autocorrelation of entry rates among scales.

Exploring the spatial dynamics of alcohol outlets and Child Protective Services referrals, substantiations, and foster care entries.

Controlling for neighborhood demographic characteristics, this study examined the relationship of alcohol outlets with rates of Child Protective Services (CPS) referrals, substantiations, and foster care entries from 1998-2003 in 579 zip codes in California. Data for this panel study were analyzed using spatial random effects panel models. Zip codes with higher concentrations of off-premise alcohol outlets (e.