Exploring the Causal Role of Child Welfare System Experiences on Juvenile Justice Involvement

The proposed dissertation research will study the relationship between child maltreatment and juvenile delinquency from a causal perspective. It takes a developmental perspective to examining: adverse child welfare experiences that could disrupt a youth’s social-emotional development and increase risk for delinquency; and how these child welfare system experiences may impact youth differently depending on their age and developmental stage.

Research questions include: Does length of time spent in child welfare out-of-home placements increase the risk for delinquency? Does age at time of initial placement moderate the relationship between length of time spent in out-of-home placements and delinquency? Child welfare data will be drawn for Santa Clara County from the California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP) for administrative child welfare data from 1998 to the present. Juvenile justice data will be obtained from Santa Clara County Probation Department for court and probation records (risk scores, arrests, probation terms, violations, detention, etc.). Analysis plans entail marginal structural modeling (such as MSM Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation) to estimate the dose-response between cumulative placements and the probability of arrests and other outcomes between 2003 and 2018, controlling for age and other variables.

"Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law," and complies with Part 200 Uniform Requirements - 2 CFR 200.210(a)(14). CA/NCF