Emergency shelter care utilization in child welfare: Who goes to shelter care? How long do they stay?

Emergency shelter care for children entering foster care is widely used as a temporary first placement, despite its contraindications. However, little research has examined predictors of utilization (e.g., entry into care, length of stay in care). A sample of 123 children (ages 6-13) entering foster care was studied to explore the variables associated with an initial placement in shelter care versus kinship care and variables associated with children staying less than 30 days in the shelter versus 30 days or longer. After applying a classification tree analysis (CTA via Optimal Data Analysis), results indicated that variables across the child's ecology--specifically the microsystem, mesosystem, and exosystem--were associated with increased emergency shelter utilization, including older age, entering as a dependency case, more relatives and fictive kin with barriers to involvement in the child's life, and the child welfare agency serving the child. These results suggest that although emergency shelter care utilization may be determined by a complex interaction of variables across the child's ecology, policy and programmatic attention to some of these risk factors might be effective in limiting utilization so that children can enter care with a more long-term, family-based placement.