Drivers of inequalities among families involved with child welfare services

Socioeconomically disadvantaged parents, such as those living in poverty, are much more likely to have their child taken into out-of-home care (OHC).

It nevertheless remains unclear how socioeconomic conditions actually cause placement in OHC or whether these differences operate through various types of parental health-related problems.

Moreover, we have limited knowledge about the effects that OHC might subsequently have on the health and wellbeing of the parents, and how this can potentially influence the chances of family reunification.

The proposed project aims to increase understanding of the drivers of inequalities among families involved with child welfare services in Sweden, by disentangling how the socioeconomic conditions of the family and parental health-related problems intersect with the children’s histories of placement in OHC.

To this end, we will compile a new, large-scale register-based cohort that consists of children born in the 1990s – The Swedish Children of the 1990s Cohort Study (SCCS) – as well as their siblings and parents.

Based on this cohort, we will apply a number of advanced statistical approaches suitable for the analysis of complex longitudinal data.

These approaches enable us to construct trajectories of the family’s socioeconomic conditions and parents’ health-related problems as well as to relate them to placement histories among the entire set of offspring; to develop risk prediction models for assessing which parents that have their child taken into care, among them, which experience family reunification; and to assess causal pathways between socioeconomic conditions, health-related problems, and experiences of child welfare services.

In sum, the findings from this project will help to identify possible entry points for social policies targeted toward disadvantaged families, in order to reduce inequalities.