Methodology:
FOSTER CARE ENTRY COHORTS
Placement Stability

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This report examines placement stability (the number of placements) for children who entered child welfare-supervised foster care for the first time during the analysis year.  For inclusion, a child must have been in care for at least 5 days and still in care at specified analysis points.  The number of available analysis periods (e.g., 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, etc.) varies according to the entry cohort year.  Thus, children who entered in earlier cohorts (e.g., 1998) can be tracked for longer periods of time than those who entered in subsequent years (e.g., 1999, 2000, etc.). 

Please note that predominant facility types of Guardian and Missing have been excluded from this analysis. Additionally, since CWS/CMS has only been operational since 1998, and the quality of data entry may have improved over time, caution should be used when making comparisons across entry cohorts. Apparent differences may be artifacts of data quality rather than true changes. 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.  

The statewide summary table includes the frequency and proportion of children still in their first or second placement at one year after entering a first spell in care.  In addition, kin and non-kin placement breakouts by age, ethnicity, and gender are provided in the by county tables. 

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. Children with missing birth date information, or those whose ages were computed to be less than 0 or greater than 17 years, were 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)

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

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

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