Kinship Care: Improving Practice Through Research

Kinship Care: Improving Practice Through Research

James P. Gleeson and Creasie Finney Hairston, Editors New York. Child Welfare League of America, 1999.

Kinship Care: Improving Practice Through Research, edited by James P. Gleeson and Creasie Finney Hairston, includes a summary of key research endeavors that essentially address seven major categories:

1. Descriptions of sociodemographics and caseload growth

2. Policy debates

3. Caseload dynamics and service pathways

4. Description of "best practices"

5. Child safety and child well-being

6. Descriptions of the parents of children in kinship foster care

7. Caregiving experiences and consequences.

The book's editors discuss the collective knowledge base that has culminated into the categories and illustrate the manner in which the studies reported in the book increase our understanding of kinship care. Much of what is captured in the book is the result of years of collaborative research conducted in Illinois and featured in a 1997 symposium sponsored by the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The 320-page book is organized into five major parts: Part I-Building Knowledge About Kinship Care as a Child Welfare Service; Part II-Facilitating Permanence; Part III-Children, Mothers, and Fathers; Part IV-Kinship Caregivers; and Part V-Conclusion. The 10 authors (including the two editors) collectively provide 12 chapters that support the book's purpose. Descriptive tables and meaningful bibliographic references also are provided.

Part I- Building Knowledge About Kinship Care as a Child Welfare Service consists of a single chapter that in a comprehensive, concise, manner summarizes the existing kinship care knowledge. Because the field is bereft of a developed base of literature on kinship care, the first chapter is especially useful in that it provides an orientation base. It also establishes the book's tone by way of a thoughtful discussion of the seven major kinship care research categories mentioned earlier. The utility of the opening chapter is found in the Gleeson's ability to provide an analysis of the discrepant viewpoints surrounding the policy studies and debates on the growth of formal kinship care. Gleeson is balanced in his presentation of the literature and his summary of key studies allows readers to do their own critical analysis and arrive at an informed opinion. Gleeson highlights many of the complexities and subtleties that surround the kinship care issue. He also provides a provoking and succinct summary of the gaps in our current knowledge base.

Part II-Facilitating Permanence contains three chapters that collectively spell out the issues involved in professional attempts to articulate what the notion of permanence is for children who are being cared for by relatives. In chapter 2 of Part II, Faith Johnson Bonecutter describes the Children's Bureau-supported Illinois study that examined permanency outcomes for children in relative foster care placements. A series of useful practice principles emanated from the study's findings. Bonecutter summarizes the view that kinship care practice should incorporate a broader view of family, strive for cultural competence, encourage collaborative decision-making, and build kinship network case management capacities. Chapter 3, also authored by Gleeson, is a summary of the findings from a secondary analysis of the study discussed in chapter 2. The study explored the extent to which kinship caregivers are made aware of the range of available permanency options (e.g., adoption and legal guardianship). The study concluded that, in fact, caregivers are not made aware of all legal permanency options. Although the summary of the study and discussion of its findings are interesting, another main contribution of chapter 2 is the summary of the literature on the reasons why children in kinship care tend to have slower rates of discharge from care. Eight essential points are derived from the literature and reported in a very helpful manner. The final chapter in Part II is coauthored by Gleeson and Sally Mason. Here, the authors studied qualitatively the clinical decision-making of caseworkers, supervisors, and administrators, which allowed them to identify the barriers and the conditions that support pursuing adoption or subsidized guardianship as permanency goals for children in kinship care. Issues of leadership, family dynamics, and caseworker bias were among the reported findings. Collectively, the chapters in Part II of the book provide a revealing picture of the permanency issues involved in kinship care and in doing so, place the growth of kinship care rates in a factual context.

Part III-Children, Mothers, and Fathers embodies four chapters. The first chapter, chapter 5, written by Sandra Altshuler is another extrapolation of the main study presented in chapter 2. The research reported by Altshuler in chapter 5 involved quantitative techniques as well as in-depth, openended interviews with African American children living in kinship care. The children were studied in order to better understand their lives, experiences, and general well-being. Although we learn from the study that children's well-being may be associated with the adequacy of the mother's housing situation and marital status, future research will need to explore the topic more broadly by looking at such issues as school performance, emotional and behavioral well-being, child mental health, and relationships with siblings and peers. Chapter 6, authored by Marian Harris, compares and contrasts two categories of mothers of children in kinship care: mothers of children who are reunified and mothers of children who remain in care. The two groups of mothers were evaluated on their sociodemographics, involvement with the major child welfare agency, services they received, strengths and weaknesses, use of substance, involvement with their own mothers, and extended family support. Among the many findings, the author reports that the two subsamples of mothers are fairly similar on most demographic questions, as well as the presence of extended family support, but are quite different with regard to substance use and mental illness (mothers of children who remain in kinship care tend to experience more problems in both areas).

Chapter 7, authored by John M. O'Donnell, examines the fathers of children who reside in kinship care, and is especially valuable because it is a discussion of a topic that rarely, if ever, receives study. Despite the limitations of the research design (i.e., secondary analysis, worker reports of past information) from which most of the information is drawn, the author provides rare insight into such key issues as the strengths possessed by fathers, father contact with caseworkers, and father involvement with the paternal and maternal families. The author probed the extent to which case managers develop strategies for working with the fathers, and reveals the manner in which caseworkers seldom attend to the role of the father in case planning decisions. The final chapter in Part III is another rarely studied but a significant topic, namely kinship care when parents are incarcerated. The book's co-editor, Creasie Finney Hairston, provides a valuable review of the literature and then offers important insights regarding fixture research in the area of kinship care involving incarcerated parents. Readers will understand the ramifications of child welfare laws and policies as they relate to the children of parents who are incarcerated.

Part IV-Kinship Caregivers includes three chapters: chapter 9 which focuses on grandparent caregivers, chapter 10 which addresses caregiver preparation and sense of control, and chapter 11, which provides a discussion of caregiver burden. Olga Osby, the author of chapter 9, reports the experiences of 10 sets of grandparents. Her study operates from a strength orientation and presents the data from the grandparent caregivers' worldview, thus giving voice to a group not often heard. The author describes the grandparents, presents their views of why the children are in care, describes the nature of the support available to grandparents, provides a discussion of their views on childrearing, and then summarizes the advice grandparents would offer to child welfare authorities. The male caregiver perspective, as well as the author's reflections on the topic, are all offered in chapter 9. In chapter 10, author Donna Petras utilized several scales and measures to ascertain kinship caregivers' level of depression, sense of preparation, sense of satisfaction, sense of control, and the caregivers' rating of children's behavior. The findings are meaningful, interesting, and, at times, surprising. In chapter 11, Rocco Cimmarusti reports the findings of his study of kinship caregivers which employed three measures: Caregiver Burden Inventory; Social Support Appraisal scales; and Symptom Checklist 90-Revised. Quantitative results are brought to life through the use of rich, thick qualitative descriptions of the caregivers' responses.

The co-editors bring the book to closure in Part V with a chapter that spells out a future research agenda that hinges around such themes as the consequences of care giving, child safety, and the role of new policy such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). In its totality, the book has a great number of strengths and is an excellent, long-awaited source on kinship care. Students, practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and child and family advocate groups will find this book invaluable. The authors' use of a variety of research methods and both qualitative and quantitative designs will be appealing to many readers. The book is challenged only by its heavy reliance on one primary data source. However, this challenge is negligible considering that the book represents one of the field's first attempts to develop an empirical source on kinship care. Many of the chapters present groundbreaking information that enhances our understanding of kinship care. The authors' and co-editors' ability to draw comparative references to other states and discuss what the results of their work may mean for research on kinship care in a broader sense, provide us with the ability to also contribute to the literature base with local, small scale, and national replications of the very worthwhile work contained in this book.

Ramona W. Denby

Assistant Professor

University of Nevada Las Vegas

School of Social Work Las Vegas, NV 89154

Copyright Families in Society Jan/Feb 2002
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