Abstract
Foster care children who experience placement disruption and foster care instability are at elevated risk for a host of poor outcomes, yet little work considers what these unstable foster care careers look like or what causes them. In this article, I start by using previous studies on foster care drift, instability, and placement disruptions to define the unstable foster care career as a subset of foster care careers. I then use administrative data on 30,239 Danish children born 1982-1987 who entered foster care to generate nine foster care careers, two of which meet the criteria for an unstable career. Children with a high number of risk factors associated with foster care entry were also the most likely to enter an unstable career. I end by discussing implications for recent studies of the effect of foster care on children’s later life outcomes and the relevance of the findings for practitioners.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Child Abuse & Neglect |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1860-1871 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| ISSN | 0145-2134 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2014 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Social Sciences
- administrative data
- foster care
- instability
- Sequence Analysis