Co-production of transition planning increased independent living service use among older adolescents in foster care.

• In Event: Coproduction and Innovation in Social Work

Abstract

Co-production, or engaging users in service decisions, has been a growing international focus in child welfare (Equit & Purtell, 2022). This is especially important for marginalized groups who have historically been excluded from decision-making about their lives, such as older adolescents and young adults preparing to exit foster care (“care leavers”). Using care leavers in California as a case, we ask: does more frequent engagement in independent living planning impact care leavers’ use of services?

In the U.S. foster care system, caseworkers are charged with preparing older adolescents unlikely to be reunified with their families or be adopted for independent adulthood. An important tool is the transitional independent living plan (TILP), which involves collaboratively engaging the care leaver in planning for their future, identifying goals, and determining service needs. The TILP can guide which Independent Living Program services (ILPs) the youth may be linked to. Depending on the care leavers’ goals and needs, ILPs may include educational support, career exploration, budgeting skills, and parenting skills, among others. Past research in this area has focused on the availability and effectiveness of ILPs and different types of co-production in TILP planning (e.g., Park et al., 2022). Less is known about whether the frequency of TILP engagement is associated with ILP service use.

Our sample includes California care leavers who were 17 years old in December 2012 and had been in foster care between their 17th and 19th birthdays (n=1,246) and 19th and 21st birthdays (n=842). We use child welfare administrative records to capture youths’ TILP and ILP records, demographic characteristics, and foster care histories. We also used data from a representative caseworker survey conducted in 2015 (n=295; response rate = 96%) to capture the county administrative context. The explanatory variable is the number of TILPs youth participated in per year in care. We use Poisson regression to predict the number of ILPs used per month and linear regression to predict the scope of ILP usage (i.e., the number of different types of ILPs used). We controlled for various youth-level and county-level factors.

On average, youth developed less than one TILP per year in care, used about one ILP per month, and used four different types of ILPs in both periods (between ages 17-19 and between 19-21). Youth with more TILPs were expected to use more and a wider range of ILPs in both periods (p<.01). Many county-level characteristics (e.g., % of caseworkers specializing in serving care leavers, quality of collaboration with other service fields) were also associated with frequency and scope of ILP utilization.

Our study offers rare empirical evidence that underscores the importance of regularly co-producing future plans with care leavers. Meaningfully engaging care leavers can be viewed as a human right supported by Article 12 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Children (Richards-Schuster & Pritzker, 2015). Our study findings underscore the importance of co-production practices, training caseworkers to work collaboratively with youth in decisions about their lives, and aiming to reduce between-county variation in TILP and ILP practices.

References

Equit, C., & Purtell, J. (Eds.). (2022). Children's Rights to Participate in Out-of-home Care: International Social Work Contexts. Taylor & Francis.

Park, S., Powers, J., Okpych, N. J., & Courtney, M. E. (2022). Co-production of Care Leavers’ Transition Planning as Young Adults: An Analysis of Young People in California Foster Care. The British Journal of Social Work, 52(6), 3385-3405. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcab252

Richards-Schuster, K. and Pritzker, S. (2015) ‘Strengthening youth participation in civic engagement: Applying the convention on the Rights of the Child to social work practice’, Children and Youth Services Review, 57, pp. 90–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.07.013

Authors

• Sunggeun Ethan Park, University of Michigan

• Nathanael J. Okpych, University of Connecticut

• Justin Harty, Arizona State University

• Mark E. Courtney, University of Chicago