Andrew Zinn

Involvement of TANF Applicant Families with Child Welfare Services

Few studies examine the relationship between welfare and child welfare populations in the wake of welfare reform. This article compares child welfare services involvement between 1996 Aid to Families with Dependent Children entrants and 1999 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) applicants in Wisconsin. Results suggest that there is considerable overlap between welfare applicant and child welfare populations, that this overlap has increased significantly since welfare reform, and that, as state TANF caseloads decline, they may be increasingly composed of families that face significant problems in balancing the demands of work and parenting.

Foster Family Characteristics, Kinship, and Permanence

Using administrative data describing 22,311 foster family placements in Illinois, this study examines the relations between foster family demographic characteristics and children’s permanency outcomes. The extent to which these relations differ for placements with kinship and nonkinship families is also examined. Results suggest that the age and race or ethnicity of foster parents, as well as foster family wage income and fostering history, predict the disposition and timing of children’s exit from care. Results also suggest that the relation between foster family kinship status and permanence is moderated by several foster family characteristics. Moreover, the relations between some of these characteristics and children’s permanency outcomes are found to differ by the type of placement (with kinship or nonkinship families). Finally, results suggest that the relation between child race and adoption is moderated by foster parent race. Implications for child welfare policy and scholarship are discussed.

Pathways to Residential Care: Latent Class and Confirmatory Analyses of Adolescents’ Adverse Placement Event Histories

This study aims to develop greater understanding of the preplacement experiences of adolescents who enter residential care through the child welfare system by identifying a discrete set of modal placement histories as indicated by the occurrence of one or more adverse placement events. To this end, we analyze the placement experiences of a sample of 2,542 adolescents entering residential care under the auspices of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (IDCFS) using repeated-measures latent class analysis (RMLCA). We identify six distinct adverse placement event pathways, differentiated by a combination of prevailing event type and the timing of adverse event onset. We find that these pathways are associated with analogous residential care discharge outcomes, that is, discharges that mirror a pathway’s prevailing event type. Moreover, we find that the likelihood of experiencing an analogous discharge is higher for adolescents experiencing pathways characterized by longer persistence than it is for adolescents experiencing pathways characterized by later onset or shorter persistence.

Classroom-Level Differences in Child-Level Bullying Experiences: Implications for Prevention and Intervention in School Settings

Objective: Bullying occurs within children’s peer groups and in classroom and school settings. Accordingly, this study aims to characterize student-level heterogeneity and change in bullying experiences by classifying students into bully/victim subgroups and to characterize how these child-level bullying experiences coalesce at the classroom and school levels. Method: A sample of 692 students in Grades 3–5 from 6 elementary schools self-reported the frequency of their involvement in bullying and victimization during the fall and spring semesters of 1 academic year. We used multilevel latent Markov modeling to identify bully/victim subgroups and classroom-level subgroup mixtures. Results: We identified 5 child-level victimization–bullying classes and 2 classroom-level mixtures, which differ in the proportions of children with few or no experiences of victimization or bullying and children who reported high levels of victimization. The proportion of classroom-level mixtures differed significantly across sampled schools, suggesting that classroom bullying climate may be partly a function of school-level phenomena. Conclusions: Classroom-level differences indicate a need for unique prevention and intervention approaches. Targeted classroom interventions may be useful for influencing students moderately involved in bullying to transition into an uninvolved state, but more intensive, individualized interventions may be needed for students who are highly involved in bullying behaviors.

Experimental Evaluation of a Child-Focused Adoption Recruitment Program for Children and Youth in Foster Care

This article describes the randomized controlled trial evaluation of the Wendys Wonderful Kids (WWK) adoption recruitment program. Based on data describing 956 children served by 21 agencies in 18 states, children served by WWK are found to be 1.7 times more likely to be adopted than children in the control group. Impacts were larger among older children, and children with psychological disorders, than other children. Implications for child welfare agencies and administrators are discussed.