Adequacy of income and the foster care placement decision: Using an odds ratio approach to examine client variables

Abstract

With more than 400,000 children in foster care in North America and the number expected to rise, it is important to know how these children are selected for removal from their parents and placed in foster care. This exploratory study examines the relative influence of categorical client variables on the dichotomous child placement variable using an odds ratio approach. Although the odds ratio appears only rarely in child welfare research studies, it is widely used in chemical, genetic, behavioral science, and medical contexts. The odds ratio has several desirable properties in the analysis of the decision-making process: the odds ratio provides a clear interpretative value that does not require transformation and is ideally suited for analyzing multidimensional tables. The findings from the odds ratio analysis are interpreted against the background of previous studies of the foster care placement decision-making process.