Abstract
The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency-Next Generation (BIAS-NG) project is supported by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. BIAS-NG aims to make human services programs work better for the people receiving services by reshaping program processes using lessons from behavioral science, an interdisciplinary field that incorporates psychology, economics, and other social sciences to provide insight into how people process information, make decisions, and take action. BIAS-NG partners with state and local agencies to identify a challenge to address, investigate its possible causes, design a behaviorally-informed intervention to address the causes, and test the efficacy and cost efficiency of the intervention relative to status quo service delivery. For this study, BIAS-NG worked with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to use insights from behavioral science to design and test two interventions intended to improve the online application process for applicants to become foster or adoptive parents, who DCFS refers to as “resource families.”
Based on input from DCFS, BIAS-NG focused efforts on better understanding challenges in the resource family application process for applicants recruited from the community to foster or adopt children in the child welfare system to whom they are not related. Their applications are considered “community resource family applications.” Because the caseworkers from DCFS who approve these applicants tend to prioritize emergency placement cases, the approval process tends to be longer for community families.
The administration of the community resource family application process includes two primary phases for DCFS. First, the Outreach and Recruitment Unit (ORU), comprised of about ten caseworkers, support community resource family applicants through the initial steps of the application process. In this stage, most potential applicants create an account in county’s online application portal, operated through Binti, a software provider for child welfare agencies, and complete an online orientation. They can then sign and submit a Resource Family Approval (RFA) initial application form, which officially begins the application process. After completing the initial application form, families must take a series of actions to trigger next steps in the full application process, such as “LiveScan” fingerprinting, submitting additional forms, and enrolling in pre-approval training (collectively “Phase I” application steps). Once these steps are complete, the application moves to a second phase, in which a RFA approval caseworker is assigned who takes over the case to complete home visits and a psycho-social assessment.
While investigating DCFS’s processes, the research team identified a problem of community resource family applicants dropping out of the full application process after signing and submitting their RFA initial application form, contributing to a low approval rate. DCFS leadership expressed concern about applicant attrition for two reasons: (1) some qualified applicants who could be approved do not make it to the end of the process; and (2) staff spend a lot of time working with applicants who are not ready or qualified to be community resource parents, which is not an efficient use of staff resources.
The research team used administrative data about community resource family applicants to further understand the scope of this problem and quantified drop-off points, or key moments when applicants dropped out of the application process in large numbers. Data showed applicants left the application process at each stage, but the biggest drop-off point was shortly after applicants “sign” (submit) the initial application form. More than 59% of community resource family applicants were withdrawn from the application process by DCFS staff after they signed their initial application form. Staff withdraw applicants either at an applicant’s request or because applicants are non-responsive to follow up. Of the applicants that were withdrawn after signing an initial application form, 32% of them were withdrawn within one month of signing. This analysis of the quantitative data combined with the qualitative impressions from DCFS staff support a contention that some unqualified and unprepared families initially apply to be community resource parents and then quickly withdraw, and some qualified families find the application process challenging to navigate.
The research team conducted interviews with DCFS staff and community resource family applicants to inform hypotheses on the behavioral barriers that may hinder applicants in completing the application steps. These included that applicants do not know how to meet requirements, or have difficulty knowing what the most appropriate decision to make is regarding those requirements; applicants miss or do not fully process information about application steps or eligibility; applicants take more time to complete the application process than the county would expect; and applicants face multiple process hassles.
In response to these behavioral challenges, DCFS and the research team developed two interventions to be included in the Binti online application portal: a readiness assessment and a collection of planning tools. These are described further in the Intervention section. The goal of the readiness assessment is to help potential community resource family applicants make a fully informed decision about whether they are ready to engage in the full application process and about whether they meet the eligibility requirements before signing and submitting an initial application form. The goal of the planning tools is to help applicants who submit the initial application with completing steps of the application process.
To capture these goals, the primary outcomes will be the percentage of potential applicants (who have completed the online orientation) who sign the RFA initial application forms within the study’s 180-day follow-up period; have their case moved to “applying” status within 180 days; and complete the Phase I application steps within both 90 days and 180 days.
The interventions are hypothesized to impact the rates of all the outcomes, but only expected to impact the speed of completion of the Phase I application steps (with the planning tools being the driver of this hypothesized increase in speed). The 90-day outcome for completion of the Phase I application steps will allow us to capture this hypothesized increase in speed. In addition, DCFS would prefer applicants to complete all application steps within 90 days from signing the RFA initial application form, although they recognize that cases do not always meet that timeline. Analyzing this outcome at both 90 days and 180 days after completion of the online orientation will capture a range of cases that will likely be processed.
For the impact evaluation, potential community resource family applicants were randomly assigned to receive the readiness assessment (program group A), the readiness assessment and planning tools (program group B), or neither (control group). The point of random assignment was when potential applicants clicked on a link on the DCFS website to access the Binti application portal. Once an applicant creates a Binti account, the applicant will permanently be assigned to the flow they were randomly assigned to. Even though random assignment will be done at this early stage in the process, the study sample will be limited to those applicants who complete online orientation. The study sample will not include those who do not create an account, as well as those who create an account but do not complete orientation. The evaluation will compare outcomes of the control group to the program groups for the full sample. In addition to the impact study, BIAS-NG is conducting accompanying implementation and cost analyses to document how the intervention was delivered and at what cost.