Assessing children's experiences of out-of-home care: Methodological challenges and opportunities

The U.S. foster care system has undergone profound changes during the past decade. Caseload growth, increases in the number of very young children entering care, and especially problematic behaviors among some children characterize the shifting foster care population (Barth, Courtney, Berrick, & Albert, 1994; U.S. House of Representatives, 1998; Wulczyn, Harden, & Goerge, 1998). Changes among out-of-home-care clients have been accompanied by a rapid transformation in the services delivery system designed for children. Kinship care has absorbed much of the growth in foster care (General Accounting Office, 1999; Hegar & Scannapieco, 1999). Specialized or treatment foster care has found increasing favor in some states (Needell, Webster, CuccaroAlamin, & Armijo, 1998), and new paradigms of service delivery that include alterations in public finance for foster care, privatization, and managed care have been developed (Peter & Johnson, 1999, Wulczyn, Zeidman, & Svirsky, 1997). When systems of care undergo fundamental changes such as these, it is important to understand outcomes for the clients the systems are designed to serve. Although child welfare researchers are making significant contributions toward developing an understanding of foster care outcomes, the primary clients of this system--children--have been given few opportunities to contribute to the literature. Researchers now have increased opportunities to understand the case characteristics and case outcomes of children in the foster care system. Administrative data systems in several large states allow extensive analysis of factors such as caseload dynamic, s, entries and exits from care, reunification, and adoption. Each of these outcomes now can be analyzed by subgroup (for example, age and ethnicity), placement type, placement reason, placement region, and various other factors (Needell et al., 1998; Wulczyn et al., 1994). Surveys and focus groups with social workers, interviews with children's care providers, and case record extraction also have been used as methodological tools to help explain the phenomenon of foster care. Yet relatively little research has included children as research participants. In fact, some of the seminal works in child welfare research have excluded children from participating directly in the research enterprise (Fein, Maluccio, & Kluger, 1990), unless their voices were captured through interviews conducted primarily for clinical purposes (Fanshel, & Shinn, 1978). This limitation in foster care research has been widespread, despite the fact that children's perspectives on their experiences in care could inform the service delivery system. Despite the importance of including children's voices in child welfare research, their relative absence from the literature is not surprising. Administrative, political, legal, and pragmatic barriers all conspire to limit researchers' access to and contact with foster children. This article discusses some of the methodological issues raised in one study conducted in California. The study sample included 100 children ages six to 13 residing in kinship or nonkinship care for a minimum of six months. The study used face-to-face interviews with the children in the homes of their caregivers and was built on previous work by the investigator (Berrick, Needell, Shlonsky, & Simmel, 1998), also involving interviews with the children's kin and nonkin foster parents. Children's interviews lasted approximately one hour. The interviews were designed to assess children's experiences of care in four fundamental domains: their experience of safety, their understanding of and contact with family, their experience of permanency, and their experience of caregiver support for their overall well-being. On the basis of our experience, we review in this article three of the most challenging issues that may be faced in conducting research with children in foster care: (1) recruitment of the study sample, (2) development of the study instrument, and (3) selection and training of interviewers. …