The purpose of the Understanding Post Adoption and Guardianship Instability for Children and Youth Who Exit Foster Care project is to examine rates of instability, factors associated with instability, and the supports and resources that promote post-permanency stability. Ultimately, the project aims to support efforts to build the capacity of federal, state, and local agencies to get accurate information about instability for children who exit foster care to adoption or guardianship. In order to examine these issues, two separate studies were conducted 1.) The Contact After Adoption or Guardianship: Child Welfare Agency and Family Interactions Study and 2.) The Survey of National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) Adopted Youth, Young Adults, Adults, and Adoptive Parents. This dataset contains data from The Contact After Adoption or Guardianship: Child Welfare Agency and Family Interactions Study.

The Contact After Adoption or Guardianship: Child Welfare Agency and Family Interactions Study (hereafter referred to as “The Contact After Adoption or Guardianship Study”) seeks to understand child welfare agency processes and procedures to help obtain better information on post adoption and post guardianship instability. The study explores the intentional and unintentional ways public child welfare agencies contact or receive information about the well-being of children and youth (and in particular, their experiences of instability) who have exited the foster care system through adoption or guardianship. Additionally, this study investigates how child welfare agencies track children and youth who exit the foster care system to adoption or guardianship and what information they collect. The study used two web-based surveys of adoption program managers (APMs) in all 50-states. One web survey focused on adoption practices, which all AMPs received, and one focused on guardianship practices. Only APMs from the 38 states that have a federally subsidized guardianship program (i.e., Kin-GAP) were asked to complete the separate guardianship survey. Seventy-two percent of the 50 APMs responded to the adoption survey and 63% of the 38 guardianship APMs responded to the guardianship survey.

Investigators: Nancy Rolock, PhD Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH Kevin White, PhD. East Carolina University Greenville, NC Heather Ringeisen, PhD RTI International Research Triangle Park, NC Rose Domanico, MA RTI International Research Triangle Park, NC Rong Bai, PhD Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH

Leyla Stambaugh, PhD RTI International Research Triangle Park, NC