Foster care youths’ high school degree: The interaction of placement instability and disability diagnosis

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Youth in foster care are less likely to obtain high school degrees compared with their peers that are outside of the child welfare system (Courtney et al., 2009, Okpych et al., 2017). Placement instability contributes to the low high school graduation rate for children in foster care (Ward, 2009; Ferguson & Wolkow, 2012), with children experiencing more placements at increased risk for not obtaining a high school degree. Placement instability is disruptive and detrimental to experiencing a consistent learning environment and to developing trusting teacher-student relationships, all of which are important to educational well-being. Beyond this, it is still important to acknowledge other individual-level characteristics, such as disability diagnoses, that may also predict high school graduation among foster care youth. Children with disabilities, including learning disabilities, mental illnesses, and physical disabilities are overrepresented in foster care system (Anctil et al., 2007). However, there is a dearth of research investigating whether the effect of foster care placement instability on the likelihood of obtaining a high school degree varies for foster care youth with different disability diagnoses. To address this gap, the current study applied the Bayesian method to two national databases on foster care youth in the United States (NYTD and AFCARS) to examine whether the association between placement instability on obtaining a high school degree depends on disability diagnosis. We hypothesize that the negative effect of placement instability on the high school graduation varies among different disability diagnoses and youth with emotional diagnosis might be more severely affected by placement instability.

Participants include N = 5,947 foster care youth (range: [17, 21]; Mean = 18.09, sd = 1.2). They have an average placement number of 5.7 with standard deviation of 6.6. Many children had a disability (48.92%), with emotional disability (16.5%) being the most common. Because several children had multiple disabilities (N = 1,200), we classified children with multiple disabilities into groups representing 2 or 3 diagnoses. To make results comparable, both non-informative prior and informative prior were assigned in this study. Bayesian data analysis was conducted using JAGS in R (R core Team 2019). The results (Table 1) indicated that youth with intellectual disability diagnosis had the most rapid change to the effect of placement instability compared with the youth without any disability. However, contrary to our hypothesis, youth with physical disability are more likely to get affected by negative effect of placement instability (mean = -0.066, 95% CI =[-0.079, -0.051]) and they can secure high school degree after experiencing more placement transitions compared with the youth without any disabilities. Another interesting finding, shown in Figure 1, was that once the placement number increases to approximately 19, the youth with two disability types had the highest likelihood of gaining high school degree, followed by youth with emotional disability diagnosis, whereas, the youth without any disability diagnosis had the least probability. The results highlight the varying effects of the placement instability on high school graduation for foster care youth with different disabilities and have important implications for policy and practice.

Author

• Nan Wang, University of Texas at San Antonio
  Presenting Author