The Empirical Ties between Religious Motivation and Altruism in Foster Parents: Implications for Faith-Based Initiatives in Foster Care and Adoption

Michael Howell-Moroney

doi:10.3390/rel5030720

Abstract

Amidst a crisis shortage of foster homes in the child welfare system, a number of innovative faith-based collaborations aimed at recruiting foster parents have recently emerged. It has been suggested that these collaborations offer a unique opportunity to recruit committed and altruistic parents as caregivers, providing much needed capacity to an overloaded child welfare system. This paper uses data from the National Survey of Current and Former Foster Parents to examine the associations between religious motivations for fostering, altruism and various measures of foster home utilization and longevity. The empirical results demonstrate that religiously motivated foster parents are more likely to have altruistic reasons for fostering, and scored higher than the non-religiously motivated group on an index of altruism. A separate empirical analysis shows that the interaction of high levels of altruism and religious motivation is associated with higher foster home utilization. No association was found between religious altruism and the parent’s expressed intent to continue providing foster care. The implications of these findings for current faith-based collaboration in the child welfare arena are discussed.

Highlights

There are reasons why the State must step in to remove children from their biological parents or other caregivers
This paper provides an empirical examination of the associations between religious motivation for fostering, altruism and various measures of foster family utilization and longevity using data from the National Survey of Current and Former Foster Parents (NSCFFP)
The first outcomes are basic measures of foster home utilization: the probability that a foster child is currently placed in the home and the total number of foster children currently placed in the home

Summary

Introduction

There are reasons why the State must step in to remove children from their biological parents or other caregivers. Some state welfare bureaucracies have begun to devote some of their resources toward efforts to partner with individual faith congregations (or consortiums) for the purpose of recruiting families to provide foster care. This paper provides an empirical examination of the associations between religious motivation for fostering, altruism and various measures of foster family utilization and longevity using data from the National Survey of Current and Former Foster Parents (NSCFFP). Even when the weights are employed to make the sample nationally representative, the multi-stage stratification design creates clustering and other design effects, which are not taken into account with conventional statistical algorithms Ignoring these design effects in the calculation of standard errors used in a variety of statistical tests will produce erroneous results. The remaining unweighted sample is 901 cases, depending upon the particular empirical application, additional cases were unusable due to missing data on one or more relevant variables

Religious Motivation and Altruism

Empirical Results for Utilization Measures

F Statistic

Empirical Results for Intent to Continue Fostering

Conclusions