Introduction
Research Questions
- How are hearing quality, information provided to the court before the initial hearing, and case characteristics related to judges’ findings of reasonable efforts to prevent removal?
- How are information provided to the court, case characteristics, and timing of the review hearings related to the judges’ findings of reasonable efforts to achieve permanency?
- How are judges’ findings of reasonable efforts and the detail documented in findings related to the likelihood of reunification?
- How are judges’ findings of reasonable efforts and the detail documented in findings related to the time for cases to achieve permanency?
The Reasonable Efforts Findings Study (REFS) provides an exploratory look at what factors are associated with judges’ reasonable efforts decisions and how those decisions relate to case outcomes for children, such as whether they are reunified with their parents or how fast they find another permanent home.
Judges play a critical role in child welfare cases. They decide when children enter and exit out-of-home care and ensure children in the child welfare system have a safe and permanent home. Through reasonable efforts findings, they also decide if child welfare agencies did enough to:
prevent the need to remove children from their parents.
make sure children have a safe and permanent home.
Judges’ reasonable efforts decisions can help children stay with their families safely or achieve other types of permanency (e.g., guardianship, adoption) faster (Milner & Kelly, 2018). However, these findings have not been researched in depth before this study.
Purpose
REFS aimed to better understand what factors are associated with judges’ reasonable efforts decisions and how these decisions relate to case outcomes for children, such as whether they are reunified with their parents or how fast they find another permanent home.
Key Findings and Highlights
As an exploratory study with a small number of sites, REFS should not be used on its own to inform recommendations for all child welfare courts. Key findings include:
No judges in the sample found that the child welfare agency did not make reasonable efforts to prevent removal (at any point in the case) or to achieve permanency (at the first review hearing).
There were significant differences across the participating sites in whether judges made a finding about reasonable efforts to achieve permanency at the first review hearing (i.e., whether they made a finding or not at the first review), the likelihood that children were returned to one or both parents, and the time it took cases to achieve permanency.
Judges were more likely to make a finding about reasonable efforts to achieve permanency when more topics (e.g., in-home safety planning, services offered to family to reunify the family) were included in documents given to the court before the hearing.
Children were less likely to reunify with their parents when cases had—
A judicial finding about reasonable efforts to achieve permanency by the first review hearing
More detailed reasonable efforts to achieve permanency findings
A petition allegation of abandonment
A presenting problem of homelessness
Children were more likely to reunify with their parents when cases had—
Less detailed reasonable efforts to achieve permanency findings
A petition allegation of physical abuse
The study results are limited in a few important ways:
The study used a convenience sample of only five sites in three states, the practices observed and study results are not representative of practices or outcomes in other child welfare courts.
There was a lack of variability in the type of reasonable efforts findings judges made, which hindered our ability to fully answer the research questions.
We had an insufficient sample of cases from each judge to examine individual judge differences in reasonable efforts findings and two sites included cases from a single judge.
Methods
We collected data in two ways:
Observing a random sample of recorded initial court hearings to capture information about hearing quality (e.g., judicial engagement of parents, topics discussed).
Reviewing court case files from the same cases to capture information on case characteristics (e.g., child age, petition allegations), reasonable efforts findings, details of findings and documents submitted to the court, timing of hearings, and case outcomes.
We collected data from a random sample of 348 closed child welfare court cases from 5 sites in 3 states.
Citation
Summers, A., Gatowski, S., Fromknecht, A., Masters, L., & Richards, T. (2024). Understanding judges’ reasonable efforts decisions in child welfare cases: Results from the Reasonable Efforts Findings Study (OPRE Report No. 2024-349). Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.