Child Welfare Thesis Statement

Research Statement

I am passionate about the field of child welfare and focused squarely on advancing scholarship on foster care and adoption through research and teaching the next generation of social work practitioners and scholars. I am knowledgeable about child welfare and youth services broadly, as a result of my past experiences as a child welfare social worker in Santa Clara County, as an applied researcher at Westat (a social science research firm) and Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, as a policy analyst with the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, and as a senior policy advisor to former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, where I worked directly on a major overhaul of the Arizona child welfare system.

TYPS is a longitudinal study seeking to understand what types of supports are available to youth during their teen years and after they turn eighteen, based on their permanency outcomes, as well as how different permanency outcomes impact health, life skills, education, safety, and vocation outcomes. Among other things, TYPS will allow me the opportunity to operationalize the conceptual classification scheme of relational permanence discussed above and test it for validity and reliability over time. To date, we have published an online literature review establishing the importance of TYPS (Adkins, Faulkner, & Pérez, 2016), fielded a pilot study, launched a website (http://utyps.org/), and are working with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to gain IRB

The Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 established the John F. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program (CFCIP) to help youth who are transitioning out of foster care to achieve self-sufficiency through an array of independent living services. Although states are required to report service receipt data to the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD), few studies have examined these national data to understand service provision for youth aging out of care. Because of my close personal (I was a featured speaker at the White House bill singing of the Foster Care Independence Act and a former recipient of independent living skills) and professional (through my work with Westat, I helped develop NYTD) attachments, I applied for and was awarded a research fellowship through Cornell University to be trained on using NYTD data to advance the field’s knowledge of independent living services. Through the Cornell fellowship I met two scholars, who I have since collaborated with to build a research agenda extending our knowledge on federal independent living services utilization. As such, we collaborated on a manuscript seeking to understand the underlying patterns of services receipt to prepare for youth’s successful transition to adulthood. This manuscript uses multi-level latent class analysis (MLCA) to identify