Abstract
Although the fundamental goals of the child welfare system include establishing and ensuring the safety, permanency, and well-being of affected children, child reentry into the foster care system has emerged recently as a substantial and growing concern (Jedwab & Shaw, 2017). Utilizing archival, statewide administrative data collected from Florida's Department of Children and Families (DCF), a series of multivariate Cox regression models were conducted on a sample of young children between the ages of 0- and 5-years (N = 3,970) to examine various socioecological risk and protective factors of foster care reentry. Several individual factors (i.e., child age at initial entry, child preferred/primary language, and child health status), microsystem factors (i.e., family structure), and ecosystem factors (i.e., removal reason, caseworker instability, total time spent in care, last placement type, and initial exit type) were related significantly to the occurrence of child foster care reentry. Although much research still is needed to elucidate fully the risk and protective factors related to foster care reentry for young children, the current study and its findings add support to several specialty programs aimed at improving outcomes of the child welfare system and highlighted several areas of improvement needed for current child welfare services. In particular, those involved in child welfare agencies, such as child welfare practitioners and case management, should pay particularly close attention to and provide additional services, as needed, to children of specific age ranges, children with health difficulties, children whose primary language is not English, and children from single-parent households.
Notes
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Graduation Date
2022
Semester
Summer
Advisor
Renk, Kimberly
Degree
Master of Science (M.S.)
College
College of Sciences
Department
Psychology
Degree Program
Clinical Psychology
Identifier
CFE0009203; DP0026799
URL
https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0026799
Language
English
Release Date
August 2023
Length of Campus-only Access
1 year
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
STARS Citation
Klaver, Samantha, "A Survival Analysis Examining Risk and Protective Factors of Foster Care Reentry for Children Aged 0 to 5 within a Social Ecological Framework" (2022). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-. 1232.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd2020/1232