Methodology:
FOSTER CARE ENTRY COHORTS
Length of Stay

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This report examines the median length of stay in foster care for children entering their first placement episode of at least 5 days using the Kaplan-Meier method.  This method allows for the median, first quartile, and third quartile durations in care to be estimated even though not all children who entered foster care will have exited the system. This method avoids the problems in interpretation that result from using closed cases and/or using point-in-time caseload to measure duration. 

Length of stay is presented in days. The median is the estimated time for half (50%) of the children who enter out-of-home care to leave a first spell in care. First and third quartiles have also been provided which are estimates of the time in days for one-fourth (25%) and three-fourths (75%) of the children entering a first spell to leave care, respectively. For inclusion, a child must have been in care for at least 5 days. Estimates which could not be calculated since the corresponding proportion of entries had not yet exited care are represented by a "**".  

For each length of stay table with estimated median, first quartile, and third quartile durations, an accompanying table of the underlying sample sizes is provided. If the sample size for a particular group is very small (as may be the case in counties with few children entering care) results should be interpreted with caution.  Unlike the point-in time analyses, this report does not adjust for children in an open episode but not an open placement for more than 6 months; all children are counted as being in care until the episode is closed in CWS/CMS. Therefore, the length of stay may be inflated depending on the quality of county data.

Placement type breakouts, as well as kin and non-kin breakouts by age, ethnicity, and gender are provided as follows: 

Placement Type – Predominant placement type refers to the placement where a child spent at least half of their time while in care and includes:

  1. Foster Family Home [Kinship]

  2. Foster Family Home [Foster]

  3. Foster Family Home [FFA]

  4. Court Specified Home

  5. Group Home

  6. Shelter

  7. Other

  8. Mixed

A placement type of "Mixed" is assigned if no particular placement type accounted for at least half of a child's time in care. Children with a predominant placement type of Guardian or Missing are excluded from these analyses. Blank cells in a given table indicate that there are no children in that particular category.

Age - Child age is organized by the following intervals:  < 1 yr, 1-2 yrs, 3-5 yrs, 6-10 yrs, 11-15 yrs, and 16-17 yrs. Children with missing birth date information, or those whose ages are computed to be less than 0 or greater than 17 years, are categorized as Missing.

Ethnicity – Child ethnicity is collapsed into five categorical variables based on 31 codes (i.e., 30 primary ethnicity type codes and a Hispanic origin indicator):

  1. Black (in CWS/CMS, Black, Ethiopian)

  2. White (in CWS/CMS, White, White-Armenian, White-Central American, White-European, White-Middle Eastern, and White-Romanian)

  3. Hispanic (in CWS/CMS, Hispanic, Mexican, South American, Caribbean, Central American, or those coded as being of Hispanic Origin)

  4. Asian/PI (in CWS/CMS, Asian Indian, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Guamanian, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Other Asian, Other Pacific Islander, Hmong, Polynesian, Samoan, and Vietnamese)

  5. Native American (in CWS/CMS, Alaskan Native and American Indian

    6.

Children for whom ethnicity was not coded are categorized as having a Missing ethnicity.

Gender - Child gender is categorized as Female, Male, or Missing.



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