Family Finding Evaluations: A Summary of Recent Findings

Overview Each year, nearly 250,000 children are removed from the custody of their parents due to abuse or neglect. Typically, children stay in foster care for a brief period of time, during which the family completes a case plan of services targeted at rehabilitation and prevention of future child maltreatment. One factor that may facilitate a successful reunification of children with their parents—or failing that, provide an alternate route to permanency through adoption or guardianship—is children's connections with extended family. However, because foster care frequently disrupts social connections, practitioners may need to take extra steps to help children maintain or re-establish these connections. One intervention that aims to do just that is Family Finding. The Family Finding model provides child welfare practitioners with intensive search and engagement techniques to identify family members and other adults close to a child in foster care, and to involve these adults in developing and carrying out a plan for the emotional and legal permanency of the child. 1 This brief reviews the results from 13 evaluations of Family Finding that have been released over the past two years. Overall, the evidence available from the recent evaluations is not sufficient to conclude that Family Finding improves youth outcomes above and beyond existing, traditional services. At the same time, the evidence is not sufficient to conclude that Family Finding does not improve outcomes. We identify three hypotheses regarding the lack of consistently positive impacts, which are not mutually exclusive, and explore the implications of each: 1) Family Finding may not have been completely and consistently implemented, 2) study parameters may not have been sufficient to detect impacts, and 3) assumptions regarding how intervention activities and outputs will result in outcomes are flawed. Key findings from the eight experimental studies—which provide stronger evidence about program effectiveness than do the non-experimental studies—include the following: • Three evaluations identified a positive impact on legal permanency. The only study to examine impacts on emotional permanency also identified a positive impact. • The studies also examined impacts on outcomes that might precede permanency, such as foster care placement stability and case plan goals. However, the great variation in the outcomes examined and how they were defined prevent us from drawing over-arching conclusions about Family Finding's effects on proximal outcomes. Twelve of the studies examined factors that might have hindered or facilitated program success. Findings from these process studies are particularly valuable, …