The Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program is an organization that utilizes lay volunteers as advocates for children in foster care to improve outcomes for those children. The effectiveness of CASAs in achieving permanency outcomes for children in foster care has been established; however, the literature has significant methodological flaws and is outdated. The purpose of this study, guided by the theory of change and social cognitive theory, was to explore whether CASA self-efficacy, through a proxy measure of education level, is related to permanency outcomes such as reunification with parents and rate of reentry to the foster care system for children in foster care. Archived data from a CASA database in Southern Idaho were examined using non-parametric statistics. The data included 138 cases, who were served by 78 CASA volunteers. The education of the CASA volunteers was used as the independent variable: 10 had a high school diploma, 23 had some college, and 45 were college graduates. Chi-square analyses indicated that there was no significant relation between the education level of CASA volunteers and permanency outcomes in the individual cases, and also that there was no significant relation between the education level of CASA volunteers and reentry rates of child protection cases on which they have served. The research contributed to social change by increasing awareness of the role the CASA program plays in the lives of children and their families involved in the child welfare system and highlighting the need for current research, as well as establishing that educational level may not be an important factor in the outcomes of CASA cases. Suggested areas for future research include a direct examination of the relation of self-efficacy of CASA volunteers about permanency outcomes and reentry rates with a larger, more generalizable population.

On any given day almost 400,000 children in the United States are living in an out-of-home care placement due to government intervention. Federal law allows for substantial variance in state child welfare policy on a number of topics. These policy decisions, however, are understudied both in terms of the forces driving them and also the impacts the policies have on actual outcomes for children in care. Utilizing a unique panel data set comprised of thirteen child welfare policies that vary both between states and over time we examine how well redistributive theory (constituent, institutional, paternalistic and resource pressures) explains state policy decisions from 2004-2010. The results provide very little confidence that redistributive pressures are driving state variance, though there are some noteworthy patterns. Within the four categories of explanatory variables, it would seem that child welfare policies are much more sensitive to changes in the social factors associated with a paternalistic response (unmarried birth rate and program utilization) and resource pressures than to constituent or institutional characteristics. Subsequently, a series of hazard models were conducted for each possible discharge outcome, using child level data from the 2010 AFCARS foster care dataset, with primary interest in the influence of policy and state level factors. Policy-level predictors primarily had negative impacts on discharge outcomes for children. Exceptions include better outcomes for children in states with higher generosity of access, increased rates of adoption and aging out with higher ASFA timeline compliance, and more discharges to reunification and adoption with more flexible adoption policy. State level factors consistently showed strong influences on child outcomes. While increased unemployment was associated with worse child outcomes, all other state level factors considered were associated with positive discharge outcomes for children in out-of-home care. This research broadens the theoretical application of redistributive theory to a new policy arena and adds an additional layer of state level explanatory variables to the much-studied outcomes for children in out-of-home care. It establishes that children and families do not exist in a vacuum and that child welfare research must take broader state and policy factors into account for a complete picture.