Campus Location

Abilene Campus (Residential)

Date of Award

5-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Social Work

Degree Name

Master of Science

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Tom Winter

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Kay Jang

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Lauren Anderson

Abstract

This study sought to identify correlations between Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) activities and exit outcomes for children in foster care. Previous research on the impact of CASA has been inconclusive and offered mixed findings, so this study sought to build off of previous research while also exploring new areas of research that have not yet been investigated. Big Country CASA’s database, Optima, was utilized to retrieve data on cases that closed during the 2021 fiscal year (September 1, 2020, to August 31, 2021). This yielded a sample size of 75 cases. Through an analysis of these cases to test five different hypotheses, it was found that higher intensity, as defined by the number of times a CASA does case-related work per month, of CASA activities per case is correlated with shorter case length. Additionally, more frequent parent contact is associated with higher likelihood of reunification. No statistically significant differences were found in intensity between cases with multiple children versus cases with one child.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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