Promising outcomes of providing anti-poverty services within a differential response system

Beginning in the 1990s, child welfare systems in the United States began implementing policy and practice changes in their response to reported cases of child abuse and neglect. A few states began implementing multiple track systems in which low risk cases were handled using a non-investigative assessment track commonly known as differential response (DR). Since the 1990s, many states have implemented various forms of DR approaches.

This study evaluated the long-term effects of providing anti-poverty services to families with reports of child maltreatment in a Midwestern state’s child protection system that had implemented DR. The pilot project examined the effectiveness of DR, with 14 of 20 counties participating in a field experiment with random assignment to an experimental or control group. The study’s main hypothesis was: anti-poverty services (i.e., material support such as housing, food, clothing utilities and transportation) to families with accepted (or screened in) reports of child maltreatment would reduce future accepted reports of maltreatment and child removals. A second hypothesis was that the DR approach would reduce future accepted reports of child maltreatment and child removals. In this state’s DR system, families that were assessed for the family track received higher levels of anti-poverty services than those families in the traditional investigative track.  

Longitudinal data was collected from the state’s SACWIS system. The unit of analysis was the family which were randomly assigned to either an experimental group (2,605 families) or a control group (1,256 families) from 2001 to 2002. Study families were tracked from 1999 (prior to assignment to the study) to 2010 (after final contact with workers). Additional information was collected from a sub-sample of families (434 in the experimental and 208 in the control group) that included data on material services received by caregivers. Findings from the study showed that the DR approach was related to an increase in anti-poverty services to the families. The authors reported a relative increase of 170% in the proportion of case openings to receive services (experimental group: 38.0%; control group: 14.1%) in the experimental group. Cox proportional hazards analyses using the subsample of the data showed a significant interaction between SES and material services on CPS accepted reports and child removal. No significant interaction was found for the control group whereas statistically significant interaction was found in the experimental group, indicating that providing material assistance to low SES families was associated with lower rates of new reports in CPS.