Collaborative Case Planning in Juvenile Court: A Study on Reunification in One Juvenile Court
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Authors
Miatovich, Marymichael
Issue Date
2013
Type
Thesis
Language
en
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to determine if creating a case plan in collaboration with parents involved in the child welfare system at the disposition hearing of the juvenile dependency case would increase the number of parents reunifying with their children in a timelier manner. A Likert-scale questionnaire was created to gauge the engagement level of the parents in their case plan at each review hearing. The questionnaire measured the number of times the parents went to services including visitation, and the number of times they were dropped from services. The initial hypothesis stated that parents who were engaged in the case planning process would be more engaged in services and, therefore, have a greater chance of reunifying with their children. Under Welfare and Institutions Code Section 16501 .1(d)( 1), the legislature expanded the maximum time to create a case plan to solicit input from the child, family, and extended family members. Whether the intentions of this legislation are achieved is unknown as a study has never been done to measure the association. An underlying assumption is that when a parent has a voice in the process they will be more invested in the outcome, but one would argue that any parent who has a child removed from their care and possibly loses them to adoption would be invested in doing their services to retain custodial rights to their child.
The study results proved the hypothesis that the engagement by social workers with parents in creating the case plan results in a higher likelihood of reunification. However, it is important to realize that there may be some outstanding factors or limitations that have not been considered in this paper. For example, the sample size is very small. The parents and children were not interviewed directly about their experiences. The entire basis of this paper is done solely on retrospective case file review. Further research would be beneficial to determine the underlying motivation of the parents.