The primary mandate of the child protection system is to ensure children are safe, either in their own homes, or out-of-home placements. While in an out-of-home placement, the federal performance standard for safety is measured by the absence of a substantiated maltreatment report. Yet, substantiation is a high bar, with inconsistent thresholds across states and municipalities, particularly for foster parents. Thus, an examination of investigations, in addition to substantiations, is warranted to bound estimates of maltreatment in out-of-home placements.

In this study, I seek to assess the risk of maltreatment in three types of out-of-home placement: non-relative foster care, formal kinship care, and voluntary kinship care. Over the last several decades, kinship care has been touted as a better alternative to non-relative foster care. Specifically, formal kinship care is the preferred option for children who must enter the foster care system, and voluntary kinship arrangements are increasingly viewed as a mechanism for reducing foster care cases. Yet, there is little to no evidence on differences in placement safety.

This study uses an administrative database containing all out-of-home placements between the years 2005 and 2012 for one Midwestern state. The analytic sample includes approximately 105,000 placements, with approximately 10,500 maltreatment investigations, and 2,200 substantiations. To estimate the risk of maltreatment during a placement, two approaches were used. First, logistic regression models were used to estimate the risk of ever having a maltreatment investigation or substantiation during the life of a placement, for all placements that were fully observed. Second, piecewise exponential survival models were estimated, including time-dependent effects for placement type. Survival models provide two primary benefits over standard regression approaches. First, they explicitly account for the differences in length of placement; and second, they allow for the inclusion of placements that began prior to the beginning of observation or continued past the end of observation.

Preliminary results suggest that voluntary kinship placements have the highest lifetime risk of a maltreatment report, whereas formal kinship placements and non-relative foster placements have similar risk. Yet, because voluntary kinship placements tend to be much longer-term arrangements, their risk at any given time point is significantly lower than their counterparts. Formal kinship placements have a lower risk of a maltreatment investigation than non-relative foster placements, but no lower risk of substantiated maltreatment. In sum, the results of this study suggest that the potential safety benefits of formal or voluntary kinship care as alternatives to non-relative foster care are small, and diminish over time.