A data base has accumulated for analyses, and administrative reports are available for supervision, management and administrative purposes. The need for this development was highlighted by two basic realities. First, a substantial number of children who enter foster care are eventually freed for adoption and are often adopted by their foster parents. Second, information about the child's early experiences and family of origin that is needed for the adoption process is often only accessible in the initial period after removal from the home. The resulting adoption module contains both Child Summary and Home Study modules which allow information to flow from foster care as well as set up an orderly information documentation system and data base specifically for foster family licensing and child adoption.
All information contained in the variables is available for report generation.
The foster family licensing component provided structure for the assess ment of family functioning in the adoption home study. The current foster care tools are running on a DOS platform. Future versions of the software will run on the new generation of data-base development tools. The current foster care information system contains open-format data that would need to be converted to list form in order to fully comply with adoption requirements. Since such an extensive revision is best conducted as part of a next stage effort for advancement of child welfare information tools, the grantee decided to develop an interim summary report of the foster care experience for children entering adoption from a foster care agency using the Integrated Information System.