Applying Organizational Ecology to the Family: The Case of Who Persists in Providing Foster Care

Abstract

The conditions under which we care for children have become increasingly diverse (Aquilino, 1991; Rodman & Pratto, 1987; Rosewater, 1989). This is due not only to profound changes in the family itself, resulting from changing patterns of divorce, remarriage, childbearing, employment, and single parenthood (Aldous, 1990; Bumpass & Castro Martin, 1989; Bumpass & Rindfuss, 1979; Bumpass, Sweet, & Castro Martin, 1990; Cherlin, 1978; Menaghan & Parcel, 1990). It is also due to the proliferation of extrafamilial forms of child care provision (Belsky, 1990; Camasso & Roche, 1991; Hofferth, 1985; Kagan, 1989). Increasing numbers of children are now being cared for regularly in a wide variety of contexts by someone other than a parent (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1988).The emergence of this diversity has raised important issues and questions concerning implications for the well-being of children. Hence, the effects on children of different types of intra-and extrafamilial caring arrangements have been studied extensively (for reviews, see Belsky, 1990; Furstenberg, 1990; Ihinger-Tallman, 1988; Menaghan & Parcel, 1990). A major underlying theme is the need to minimize disruptions and instability in children's lives because the emotional stress otherwise induced may have long-term, negative effects for a substantial minority (Bumpass, 1984; Bumpass & Rindfuss, 1979; Furstenberg, 1990; Moen & Schor, 1987). However, despite this emphasis, the literature contains few studies reporting empirically informed explanations of the longevity of extrafamilial child care arrangements. We know little about the survival patterns of extrafamilial child care providers, and, in particular, about the survival patterns of the many families who take on the task of caring for others' children. Since the survival of care-providing arrangements would appear to be a precondition for limiting socioemotional stress to children due to change and instability, this is a relatively significant oversight.We attempt in this article to contribute some increased understanding of factors underlying the survival patterns of families who care for other's children. We study the history of a population of foster homes over a 23-year period, exploring general arguments adapted from organizational ecology that might account for observed patterns of exits. Our purpose is mainly exploratory. We aim not to test hypotheses and formally confirm theoretical arguments, but to appraise the viability of generalizing propositions and concepts from organizational ecology to the study of extrafamilial care arrangements. We believe that demonstrating the viability of such an approach may contribute to the development of substantively informed theory of the dynamics of caring in modern societies.We choose to study foster homes because of the availability of files recording when individual families become foster homes, and the changes over time in the statuses and circumstances of these families and of the children for whom they provide care. Thus, relatively fine-grained event history data are available for individual families and children. This is important because the methods of dynamic analysis used to test arguments about the survival patterns of different units of study presume temporal data structures that contain an adequate representation of how individual units change at any point in time.THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDAn examination of the research literature on extrafamilial forms of child care shows that there has been little direct study of their survival patterns. While this literature does identify profitability and changes in government funding as factors affecting the supply of child care at any given time (e.g., Hofferth & Phillips, 1987), researchers have not addressed the question of how these and other factors influence the overall stability and longevity of child care arrangements. To the extent that research has addressed the issue of longevity, it is has done so on an inferential basis, and mainly from the perspective of factors associated with individual decisions by parents or care providers to stay in or to leave particular care arrangements (e. …