Evaluating the self-expressed unmet needs of emancipated foster youth over time
Introduction
The transition to adulthood is a sudden one for youth who age-out of the foster care system. Upon turning 18 years old (or, in some states, 21 years old), foster youth become emancipated from the guardianship of the state with the expectation that they will be able to effectively provide for themselves as independent adults. While young adults outside of the foster care system can lean on their parents for support in areas such as finance and housing, foster youth tend to enter independent life without prerequisite skills in these areas, without knowledge of resources available to them, and without familial support. It's no surprise that these teenagers and young adults have historically found themselves in great need; their struggles have been widely documented in the literature (see, e.g., Berzin et al., 2011, Courtney, 2009, US Government Accountability Office, 2004, Courtney, Dworsky, et al., 2011a, Geenen and Powers, 2007, Mares, 2010, Pecora et al., 2003).
In an attempt to ameliorate this need, the Federal Government established the Independent Living Program in 1986 as an amendment to Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. Funding was given to states with the expectation that they would establish programs to help prepare teens and young adults for the transition to independent life. Further federal support was given in 1999 when the Foster Care Independence Act authorized the creation of the John Chafee Foster Care Independence Program. This resulted in the doubling of amount of money available to states and gave states greater discretion in spending. The Chafee Program also granted states the option of extending independent living services (and Medicaid coverage) until youth turned 21. The need for continuing support after age 18 has since been reaffirmed; with the passage of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act in 2008, Title IV-E was amended to include federal reimbursement for costs of foster care payments at state option until qualifying youth are 21 years of age. This reimbursement became available beginning in the federal fiscal year of 2011.
As a result of these advances, many youth who are aging out of foster care receive some form of independent living services prior to emancipation, however the types of services differ significantly by state (Dworsky and Havlicek, 2009, US Government Accountability Office, 2004). Some agencies offer teen-specific foster care programs, aimed specifically to target the needs of older foster youth and prepare them for independent living. However, despite the focus on this issue in child welfare policy over the past twenty-five years, teens continue to report that they have trouble transitioning to adulthood. The study reported here explores the self-reported unmet need for services of young people making the transition to adulthood from foster care after the creation of the Chafee Program. Specifically, it examines the level and nature of unmet need, trends in unmet need between age 17 and 21, the relationship between expressed unmet need and various youth characteristics, and whether youth who report receiving more independent living preparation are less likely to report having needs that went unmet by their agency. Before describing the study and its findings, we turn to a review of relevant prior research.
Section snippets
Background
There have been a handful of small qualitative studies done to examine the troubles that older youth in foster care and those making the transition to adulthood face and their needs that continue to go unmet. While these studies have only interviewed small groups of young adults who have become emancipated, the needs they have expressed have emerged somewhat thematically.
Youth who were interviewed have expressed concern about the provision of effective case management services (Barth, 1990,
Research questions
Findings of prior research provide an important, albeit incomplete, picture of the independent living skills acquisition of youth aging out of the foster care system. In particular, the majority of existing studies rely on small convenience samples, contributing to questionable generalizability of their findings, despite their general consistency. It is unclear whether these same observations would emerge in a much larger and more representative sample. Moreover, it remains unclear how
Research design & methods: the Midwest study
The Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (‘The Midwest Study’) is a longitudinal study that has followed youth in the states of Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin as they ‘age out’ of the child welfare system and transition to adulthood. The Midwest Study is unique in being the only large-scale longitudinal examination of the transition to adulthood for foster youth who came of age after the passage of the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999. The three states involved
Results
We present here the results of our analyses of self-reported unmet need for assistance among youth making the transition to adulthood from foster care. We begin with a description of our sample. We then move to a description of trends over time in unmet need and the turn to the results of our logistic regression models of predictors of unmet need at baseline and wave 3 of the Midwest Study.
Discussion
We began this study with four central research questions relating to the reported unmet need of youth aging out of the foster care system. The first concerned the percentage of those youth who expressed unmet need. It was not surprising that over one quarter of our sample reported that the agency had not met all of their needs pertaining to independent living, and it was also not surprising that unmet needs most frequently fell in the domains of finance and housing (two of the most frequent
Study limitations
This study's findings should be interpreted in the context of study limitations. First, youth participating in the baseline interview were asked to recall the independent living training they received while in care but were not asked to recall who provided this training. Training could have been provided by any number of parties including an agency representative, a friend, a foster parent/foster family member or a biological parent/family member. It could have been provided in a formal manner
Future research
There are a number of ways in which future scholarship could build upon these findings. Many of the youth who participated in the Midwest Study appeared to feel as though they had received the independent living skills they needed to live on their own after emancipation; 37% of the youth did not report an unmet service need at any wave of data collection. Future studies could explore how these youth acquired these independent living skills and if training (informal and/or formal) took place
Acknowledgments
This research was made possible by the state child welfare agencies in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Stuart Foundation, the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, and Casey Family Programs.
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