Foster Care: Kinship Care Quality and Permanency Issues Page: 4 of 120
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B-279199
In conducting this work, we reviewed recent research, federal statutes and
regulations, and California and Illinois legislation and initiatives regarding
kinship care. In addition, we surveyed samples of foster care cases in
California and Illinois that were in their foster care systems on September
15, 1997, and had been there since at least March 1, 1997. We selected
these two states because they have large kinship care populations, have
different child welfare administration structures, and are located in
different geographic areas. We asked the caseworker responsible for each
case to respond to a questionnaire regarding several dimensions of the
quality of foster care in that case and the permanency goals pursued as of
September 15, 1997. Because this survey is limited to the foster care
population in two states, the results cannot be generalized to the foster
care population either nationwide or in any other individual state.
However, results can be generalized to these two states, which account for
about one-quarter of the nation's foster care population and almost half of
the kinship care population nationwide. We conducted our fieldwork
between April 1997 and December 1998 in accordance with generally
accepted government auditing standards. A more detailed description of
our scope and methodology appears in appendix I.Results in Brief
Our survey of open foster care cases in California and Illinois showed that
in most respects the quality of both kinship and other foster care was good
and that the experiences of children in kinship care and children in other
foster care settings were comparable. We found that caregivers both in
kinship care and in other foster care settings demonstrated good parenting
skills overall. We also confirmed the generally held belief that there is
more continuity in the lives of children in kinship care before and after
they enter foster care than there is in other foster children's lives.
However, in cases in which the courts have restricted parental visits with
foster children to help ensure the children's safety, the proportion of cases
in which the caseworker believed that the caregiver was likely to enforce
the restrictions was somewhat smaller among kinship care cases than
among other foster care cases. Moreover, some of the standards that
California and Illinois use to ensure good quality foster care and the level
of support each state provides to foster caregivers are lower for kinship
care than other types of foster care.
Previous research on children who have left foster care has shown that
children who had been in kinship care were less likely to be adopted and
stayed longer in foster care than other foster children. Between California
and Illinois, our survey showed no consistent findings regarding theGAO/HEHS-99-32 Kinship Foster Care
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United States. General Accounting Office. Foster Care: Kinship Care Quality and Permanency Issues, report, May 6, 1999; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc290775/m1/4/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.