Document Type

Post-Print

Publication Date

3-20-2015

Subjects

Family social work -- United States, Social networks, Social support systems, Foster home care, Foster children

Abstract

Multi-dimensional social support is an important factor in any positive transition into young adulthood, and youth who are exiting foster care ideally receive comprehensive social support from a range of informal and formal sources. Yet the social networks of transition-age foster youth are likely influenced over time by child welfare involvement, which can weaken or disrupt natural support relationships, while introducing service-oriented relationships that are not intended to last into adulthood. To better understand the social support context of youth aging out of care, we can apply social network theory and methods to systematically identify their networks of supportive relationships and explore support provision as a network-based indicator. This paper presents a methodological approach to measure foster youth support networks, and describes these networks in terms of their capacity to provide support as a function of size, composition, and density, and in terms of actual support provision through identified relationships. Such a measurement approach should be systematic and reliable over time, and capture social support constructs relevant to practice with this population; preliminary inter-item and test-retest consistency findings are promising, and the method demonstrates construct and predictive validity in comparison with a measure of perceived availability of social support.

Description

© 2015. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Children and Youth Services Review. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Children and Youth Services Review, Volume 52, 2015, Pages 123-134.

DOI

10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.03.014

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/14559

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