Family Reunification: Research Findings, Issues, and Directions.

Reuniting children in out-of-home care with their families has long been a primary goal of public and private child welfare services, and more recently a fundamental component of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-272), as well as subsequent federal legislation to preserve families. Child welfare agencies are increasingly realizing the urgent need to reexamine their services and implement system changes that can promote family reunification. This task is currently intensified by various forces that are moving states to restructure their service delivery, including new federal legislation on family preservation, class action lawsuits over the conditions of the child welfare system, and concern over the effectiveness of existing services.Given the above context, it is timely to ask how research can contribute to the reexamination and strengthening of family reunification services. The emphasis on research is appropriate because knowledge has the potential to help strengthen practice and programs and inform policy formulation and program planning in child and family welfare. This article reviews research findings from related studies, delineates knowledge gaps and questions that should be explored by research, and identifies emerging research priorities.What Is Family Reunification? Family reunification has traditionally referred to the physical reunion of children, who are placed in family foster care or group care settings, with their biological families, and practice has been based on the premise that children should either be returned to their families or placed permanently elsewhere. This premise reflects the emphasis in the permanency planning movement on the importance of a family in a child's development [Maluccio et al. 1986]. More recently, however, the concept of family reunification has been rethought and expanded, as one expression of the renewed emphasis on permanency planning and family preservation. Accordingly, Maluccio et al. [1993] have redefined reunification as the planned process of reconnecting children in out-of-home care with their biological families to help them achieve and maintain their optimal level of reconnection--from full reentry of the child into the family system to partial contact or periodic visiting. Such an expanded view "underscores the value of maintaining and enhancing connectedness between children in out-of-home care and their families and of reconnecting children and their families when possible. At the same time, it recognizes that not every parent can be a daily caregiver and that some families, though not able to live together, can still maintain kinship bonds" [Maluccio et al. 1993: 6]. In light of this broad definition, a review of research on family reunification requires examination of studies of out-of-home care, permanency planning, and decision-making in child welfare; little research has been conducted on family reunification as such. Aggregating findings from existing studies is problematic, due to methodological limitations in a number of respects: cross-sectional vs. cohort samples, lack of comparison groups, unrepresentativeness of small samples, and differences in operational definitions, data sources, and measurements.What Do We Know? The following selective review of studies highlights findings related directly or indirectly to family reunification. (Research on kinship foster care is not included, since it is covered elsewhere in this volume.)Reentry into Out-of-Home CareFollow-up studies give partial answers to the questions of what percentage of children in out-of-home care are reunified with the biological parents, and how many of the children reenter out-of-home care. The picture is far from clear, however, for several reasons. First, many follow-up studies rely on samples of children who originally entered the system before the permanency planning legislation. Second, the studies include children dissimilar with respect to demographics, reasons for placement, and other variables. …