Abstract
Although system is a word frequently invoked in discussions of foster care policy and practice, there have been few if any attempts by child welfare researchers to understand the ways in which the foster care system is a system. As a consequence, insights from system science have yet to be applied in meaningful ways to the problem of making foster care systems more effective. In this study, we draw on population biology to organize a study of admissions and discharges to foster care over a 15-year period. We are interested specifically in whether resource constraints, which are conceptualized here as the number of beds, lead to a coupling of admissions and discharges within congregate care. The results, which are descriptive in nature, are consistent with theory that ties admissions and discharges together because of a resource constraint. From the data, it is clear that the underlying system exerts an important constraint on what are normally viewed as individual-level decisions. Our discussion calls on extending efforts to understand the role of system science in studies of child welfare systems, with a particular emphasis on the role of feedback as a causal influence.
Highlights
In this paper, we examine whether there is a population-level relationship, over time, between how many children enter foster care and how many children leave
Our interest in the number of children entering and leaving foster care is inspired by population biology, a field wherein core theoretical and empirical questions revolve around the size of a population over time and the resource and feedback mechanisms that influence change in that population
The findings offered here begin to characterize the true nature of the foster care system
Summary
We examine whether there is a population-level relationship, over time, between how many children enter foster care and how many children leave. Our interest in the number of children entering and leaving foster care is inspired by population biology, a field wherein core theoretical and empirical questions revolve around the size of a population over time and the resource and feedback mechanisms that influence change in that population. In these models, the carrying capacity of the host environment supports a population of a given size [1]. Birth and death processes adjust in response to the availability of resources (i.e., constrained capacity), thereby producing a population sized to fit within the capacity constraint. In our work, which adopts a different empirical strategy, we use entry and exit dynamics over an extended, fine-grained temporal scale to establish whether the system behaves in a manner consistent with the presence of a carrying capacity or resource constraint
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