Well-Being of Children in Kinship Care Placements
Research Watch, a periodical review of research articles published
in the leading child welfare journals, is a joint initiative of the
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the Universities of 平特五不中 and Toronto meet on a monthly basis to
review听recently published child welfare studies. The most
relevant and well designed studies are summarized and disseminated
through the CECW's list of over 2500 subscribers across Canada.
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The articles listed below can be accessed through the corresponding journal website or accessed at a local library or university. |
Well-Being of Children in Kinship Care Placements
Source: Winokur, M., Holtan, A., &
Valentine, D. (2009). Kinship care for the safety, permanency, and
well-being of children removed from the home for maltreatment.
Campbell Collaboration Systematic Reviews, DOI:
10.4073/csr.2009.1, retrieved online at: . This Campbell/Cochrane Systematic Review followed a prescribed
and transparent method of retrieving, appraising and synthesizing
empirical studies relevant to the research question. This study was
vetted by both experts in the field of practice and by experts
specializing in data synthesis methodologies. Systematic reviews of
existing literature are increasingly being used to harness existing
research evidence while addressing many of the biases inherent in
narrative reviews. Systematic reviews differ from narrative reviews
because they are more rigorous in information retrieval strategies;
they follow an explicit and transparent criteria for appraising the
quality of existing research evidence, they attempt to identify and
control for different types of bias in existing studies; and they
have explicit ways of establishing the comparability (or
incomparability) of different studies. These steps increase the
scientific merit of combining studies to establish a cumulative
effect of what the existing evidence is telling us about the
research question. In reviewing systematic reviews, it is important
to consider both the overall effects and the effects based on
sub-analyses, as systematic reviews can provide rich details about
the complexity of trying to apply this new knowledge to a practice
and/or policy context. Campbell Collaboration and Cochrane
Collaboration reviews are generally considered to be of the very
highest quality systematic reviews and they receive extensive peer
review from methods and content experts in the field. Due to the
nature of this particular intervention (kinship care), this review
included non-randomized studies that used a parallel cohort design
(i.e., studies where a control condition was followed at the same
time as the intervention condition, but the control condition did
not receive the intervention). The use of such studies, while
necessary and informative in this case, means that there is less
certainty with respect to causality. That is, there is less
certainty that kinship care results in better or worse outcomes for
children than there would be if children were randomly assigned to
receive either kinship care or foster care (an obvious ethical
impossibility). Nonetheless, this systematic review appears to
offer a best guess as to the effectiveness of kinship care as an
intervention. |
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