2018 - 2022
Juvenile and family court judges are responsible for deciding when children enter and exit out-of-home care and for ensuring children in the child welfare system achieve safety, permanency, and well-being. The quality of child welfare court hearings is important because each of the hearings provides judges with an opportunity to learn about the child and parent as well as the family’s strengths, needs, and progress. While some research has explored child welfare hearing quality, questions remain about how to support effective judicial decision-making and improve outcomes for children and families. As part of this project, the project team:
- Assessed the knowledge base related to judicial decision-making and hearing quality in child welfare cases.
- Surveyed and did follow-up interviews of Court Improvement Project (CIP) Administrators to understand current CIP projects and court practices in child welfare courts to inform a future study.
- Developed a Conceptual Model of Judicial Decision-Making and Hearing Quality in Child Welfare.
- Put together a Compendium of Measures and Data Sources that can be used by child welfare legal professionals to gather data and do research that can inform their court hearing practices.
- Completed the Reasonable Efforts Findings Study (REFS)
- Developed short snapshots and infographics for legal professionals with information learned from the project, such as a short overview of the research on child welfare hearing quality, examples of how the compendium can be used, and findings from the Reasonable Efforts Findings Study.
The Reasonable Efforts Findings Study (REFS) examined two types of reasonable efforts findings that judges must make during a child welfare case:
Within 60 days of a child being removed from their home the judge must decide if the child welfare agency made reasonable efforts to prevent removal.
Within 12 months of the child entering foster care the judge must decide if the child welfare agency made reasonable efforts to achieve permanency.
The goals of the REFS study were to:
Understand factors that influence judges’ reasonable efforts findings, such as information provided to the court before hearings, hearing quality characteristics, the child welfare case characteristics, and case processing practices.
Explore what reasonable efforts decisions are made and how are they documented in the court record.
Explore how judges’ reasonable efforts decisions are related to case outcomes, such as how likely it is that children will reunify with their families and the amount of time it takes for a child welfare court case to achieve permanency.
The pre-registration for the REFS study was at the Research Registry.
The contract was awarded to James Bell Associates (Anne Fromknecht as Project Director) in collaboration with Sophia Gatwoski, Alicia Summers, and the American Bar Association.
Points of contact: Alysia Blandon and Sarah Blankenship
Information collections related to this project have been reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under ACF’s Generic Clearance for Formative Data Collections for ACF Research (OMB #0970-0356). Related materials are available at the Understanding Judicial Decision-Making and Hearing Quality in Child Welfare: Descriptive Study of Child Welfare Courts page on RegInfo.gov .