This study will identify the factors that lead to a foster child's psychiatric hospitalization or other restrictive mental health setting during childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Using longitudinal, individual-level information from the state child welfare, mental health and Medicaid agencies, the study will examine the effect of handicaps and diagnoses, abuse and neglect histories, demographic characteristics, family characteristics, placement and residential care histories, and other community and group-level indicators on transitions into restrictive mental health service settings. The study population is over 140,000 Illinois foster children, aged 0-21, who were removed from the custody of their parents for the reasons of abuse, neglect, abandonment, child behavior and dependency between 1976 and 1992. These children comprise an extremely vulnerable population, which in Illinois is 55% minority, 67% AFDC eligible, and predominantly from single-parent families.
The specific aims are: 1) To describe the sequence, timing and duration of mental health services that foster children experience throughout their child welfare career; 2) To construct a mathematical model of the transition of foster children from community-based care to institutional mental health service settings. 3) To help state policy-makers use these research results as a planning tool for children's mental health services. The study will be done in cooperation with the Illinois Departments of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities and Children and Family Services in the spirit of the Public Academic Liaison program. These organizations have provided the computerized administrative data on services to children that have been linked by the study group to form an integrated database on foster care and mental health services. The investigators will use both descriptive and event-history methodologies to describe the careers and transitions that foster children experience in the child welfare and mental health systems, using a unique database constructed of state administrative data linked together.
