Clarification Notes
This appendix provides additional clarification of selected data items in this report. The following items are discussed: Child Maltreatment Victims; Child Fatalities; Race/Ethnicity; Median Length of Stay of Children in Foster Care; Children Waiting to be Adopted; Children Adopted; Recurrence of Maltreatment; Group Homes and Institutions; and Child Welfare and the Juvenile Justice Population.
Child Maltreatment Victims
In the NCANDS, a victim is defined as a child who has been found by the child protective services agency to have been the subject of a substantiated or indicated report of maltreatment. If a child is the subject of more than one substantiated or indicated report, he or she may be counted more than once as a victim.
A “substantiated report” is one in which the allegation of maltreatment or risk of maltreatment was supported or founded according to State law or State policy. An “indicated report” is one in which there was reason to suspect maltreatment, but maltreatment was unable to be founded under State law or State policy.
The majority of States report to NCANDS using only the category of “substantiated.” Those States that use both categories, “substantiated” and “indicated,” may have higher rates of child maltreatment victims than those States that use only one category. The counts of victims are based on both substantiated and indicated findings in the following States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, South Dakota, and Washington. (See Child Maltreatment 1997 on the Internet at http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb for additional information.)
Child Fatalities
The numbers of child fatalities reported by State child welfare agencies are based on information that is available to the State child protective services agency. These numbers are influenced by the specific State and local policies and protocols for investigating child deaths, including suspicious deaths, such as deaths due to drowning or car accident, which might be accidental or due to neglect.
Investigations of child deaths are conducted by local law enforcement agencies, coroner's offices, fatality review boards, and courts. The State statistics on child fatalities due to maltreatment may undercount the actual number of such deaths, if the results of these investigations are not provided to the State agency or if suspicious child deaths are not fully investigated.
Race/Ethnicity
Since the NCANDS Summary Data Component collects aggregate data, it has not always been possible to eliminate the duplicated counting of child victims as being of Hispanic Ethnicity and of a certain race. Therefore, the total shown for the race/ethnicity of child victims is greater than 100 percent for some States, indicating that Hispanic children are counted both by Hispanic ethnicity and by race.
Case-level data from the AFCARS are used in reporting on the race and ethnicity of children in foster care and waiting children. A child's race/ethnicity is counted as Hispanic if his/her Hispanic Origin is indicated to be “Yes,” regardless of race, including those children whose race has been identified as “Unable to Determine” or for whom the race data are missing.
A child is identified by his/her reported race, if “Hispanic Origin” has been coded as “No” or “Unable to Determine,” or the Hispanic Origin data are missing.
A child's race/ethnicity is identified as “Unable to Determine,” in four instances. They are: if a child's race is indicated as “Unable to Determine” and Hispanic Origin is “No” or missing and if a child's race is missing and Hispanic Origin is “No” or “Unable to Determine.”
A child's race/ethnicity is identified as “Missing,” if data on both race and Hispanic Origin are missing.
In legacy child welfare information systems, data may not be collected for each child on both Hispanic ethnicity and race. In these systems, the number of children reported as being of Hispanic ethnicity may be an undercount.
Median Length of Stay of Children in Foster
Care
The median is score of the middle case, when the scores for all cases are arranged in order. For example, if data on 125 children are ordered from the shortest length of stay to the longest length of stay, the length of stay of the 63rd child (the child in the middle of the distribution) is the median length of stay.
Children Waiting to
be Adopted
Children who have been counted as “waiting to be adopted” are those with a goal of adoption and/or whose parents' rights have been terminated. Children whose parents' rights have been terminated, and who are 16 years and older, are not counted as “waiting,” if they have a goal of emancipation.
Children Adopted
Adoption is defined as the establishment of a legal relationship of parent and child between persons who are not so related by birth, with the same mutual rights and obligations that exist between children and their birth parents. The completion of the legal process marks the achievement of adoption. Because adoptions finalized in any fiscal year can be reported to AFCARS without penalties in any subsequent year, the data in this report may reflect some degree of undercount of the total number of children who were adopted during Fiscal Year 1998.
The data submitted to AFCARS on adoption of children may include children who were adopted without the involvement of the State child welfare system. Only children who have been designated to have had “state involvement” are reported as adopted children in the Context Data, Section E. “State agency involvement” includes children who have been placed for adoption by the child welfare agency; special needs children, who were adopted in the State, whether or not they were in the public foster care system prior to the adoption, and for whom non-recurring expenses were reimbursed; and children for whom an adoption assistance payment or service is being provided based on arrangements made by or through the State agency.
For some States, fewer adopted children are reported in Outcome 5, Reduce Time in Foster Care to Adoption, than are reported in Context Data, Section E. There are two possible reasons for this disparity. One reason is that some States were able to provide data on adoption to the AFCARS Adoption Database, which is used for the context data, but did not code adoption as a discharge option in their AFCARS Foster Care data submission, which is used for Outcome 5. This is in part due to the traditional separation of adoption and foster care data systems in State agencies. A second reason is that this outcome refers only to those children who have been in foster care and have been adopted, while the context data refer to all children who were classified as having been adopted with “State agency involvement.”
The reported numbers may differ from those associated with the Adoption Incentive Program because adoptions reported for that program are identified through a different AFCARS data element and must qualify in other ways to be counted toward the award of incentive funds.
Recurrence of
Maltreatment
Recurrence is defined as the association of a child with more than one report in which he or she is found to be a victim of maltreatment. In order to follow each child who was the subject of a report in 1997, for an additional 12 months, data for 1998 would need to be available. In this report, since the 1998 data are not yet available, an estimating technique has been used to forecast the recurrence rate of child abuse and neglect victims. Recurrence estimates have been generated using the Survival Analysis function provided in the statistical package, SPSS. Using data from previous years, the results of the estimation process have been compared to actual rates. In general, estimated rates appear to be slightly lower than actual rates.
The rules for computing recurrence have been adjusted to exclude any reports that occur on the day or the day after the initial report in the reporting period. This adjustment minimizes the effect of multiple reports on the same incident being considered as recurrence of maltreatment.
Group Homes and Institutions
“Group home” is defined as a licensed or approved home providing 24-hour care for children in a small group setting that generally has 7 to 12 children. (Some States may include as group homes some settings with fewer than seven children.) “Institution” is defined as a child care facility operated by a public or private agency and providing 24-hour care and/or treatment for children who require being separated from their own homes and a group living experience. These facilities may include child care institutions, residential treatment facilities, maternity homes, long term hospital care, and juvenile justice facilities. In some instances, children may live in a group home in a campus setting, classified as an institution. In some States, the AFCARS population includes youth in juvenile justice facilities, who are under the placement, care or supervision of the title IV-E/IV-B agency. “Other settings” includes pre-adoptive homes, relative foster family homes, non-relative foster family homes, supervised independent living, runaways, and trial home visit.
Child Welfare and
Juvenile Justice Population
Some States include in their AFCARS foster care population children who are in their juvenile justice system. Of this population there are two groups. One is children that were already in foster care when becoming involved with the juvenile justice system. The other is children that first become involved in the juvenile justice system and who were ultimately placed in an eligible title IV-E reimbursable foster care setting. While the characteristics associated with these children's experience in foster care can vary from State to State, they are nonetheless children in foster care for whom the State has placement, care, or supervision responsibility. The proportion of juvenile justice children in individual State foster care populations varies significantly.
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