Juvenile court judicial expertise and children's permanency outcomes

Andrew Zinn and Britany Orlebeke

Children and Youth Services Review, 2017, vol. 77, issue C, 46-54

Abstract: Using a combination of survey and administrative data, the current study examines the relationship between juvenile dependency court judicial expertise and children's permanency outcomes. Specifically, based on several behaviorally-anchored questions about judicial expertise and decision-making from a survey of attorneys representing foster children, we examine the respective relationships between jurisdiction-level judicial expertise and the rates of (a) exit to different types of permanency and (b) transition between various dependency court milestones. Results suggest that judicial expertise is positively related to the rates of some dependency court transitions (e.g., entry to dispositional order approval, termination of parental rights to adoption finalization). However, because of a lack of significant associations with the rates of other transitions (e.g., dispositional order approval to reunification), judicial expertise is not found to be statistically significantly associated with the rate of exit to permanency. The findings are consistent with a growing body of evidence that suggests that the influence of juvenile-court-related factors may be limited to specific court milestones that, by themselves, do not account for a substantial proportion of the overall variability in the population-level rates of permanency exit.

Keywords: Juvenile court; Dependency court; Judicial expertise; Reunification; Adoption; Guardianship; Foster care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019074091730258X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:77:y:2017:i:c:p:46-54

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.03.011

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().