Methodology
Siblings in Child Welfare Supervised Foster Care (Placed All or Some Together)
Notes on Source Data
IMPORTANT NOTE: The following methodology may include references to report features not available on the public site version. On the public site, masking is performed to protect the privacy of individuals served by CDSS and comply with CDSS data de-identification guidelines. Values of 1 to 10 and calculations based on values of 1 to 10 are masked ('M' or '*'). In stratified views of the data, additional values (the lowest available) are masked to prevent calculation of values 1 to 10.
These reports provide point-in-time counts of sibling groups placed in Child Welfare supervised foster care. Users may select report data for children who are placed with either 'all' or 'all or some' of their siblings. Sibling groups are identified at the county level, not the state level. A sibling group size of ‘one’ is used to signify a single child with no known siblings in the supervising county. When children are not in an active out-of-home placement, the last known placement home is used to determine whether siblings were placed together.
Sibling groups are constructed from an unduplicated point-in-time count of all children who have an open placement episode in the CWS/CMS system (see the In Care/Point In Time methodology for additional details). A set of sibling identifier variables (derived from the CWS/CMS Client Relationship table) and placement address variables (derived from the facility address information from the Placement Home table) are used to locate all whole, half, and step-siblings.
Data tables are stratified by county (rows). In single-time views of the data, the columns present five statistics: ‘Number of Instances’ is a count of all child/youth placements for children and youth who have siblings in foster care in the same county (i.e., count of all children/youth in sibling groups of 2 or more). Columns labeled ‘Placements with All Siblings’ and ‘Percent with All Siblings’ contain information for those groups in which all siblings were placed together. The columns labeled ‘Placements All or Some Siblings’ and ‘Percent All or Some Siblings’ contain information for those sibling groups where at least 2, and up to and including all siblings, were placed together. Multi time views of the data allow you to select one of these statistics and display values over time.
Based on your Age Group selection, the children and youth included in the analysis are either age 0 to 17 or 0 to 20 years on the specified date. Neither of these age ranges correspond to the Point in Time/In Care reports which are based on children age 0-21 years. For correspondence with the Point-In-Time reports, restrict the Point in Time/In Care reports to the age subgroup 0-17 or 0-20 years using the filters.
You may also select the Relative or Nonrelative Placement option to restrict your analysis:
Relative- Relative/NREFM
- Tribally Approved Home
Nonrelative- All other applicable placement types
Children and youth with a missing placement type are excluded from these reports.
For a complete list of current placement type definitions, please see: Placement Type
Cells containing a period (".") represent a value of zero. In cells representing quotients, a period may also indicate the indeterminate form 0/0.