More About the Dads: Exploring Associations between Nonresident Father Involvement and Child Welfare Case Outcomes

This report is a follow-up to the study What About the Dads, published by ASPE and ACF in 2006. The original study examined child welfare agencies' efforts to identify, locate, and involve nonresident fathers of children in foster care. This report, using administrative data supplied by each of the states that participated in the original study, examines case outcomes for the children whose caseworkers were previously interviewed. At the time the data were extracted for this follow-up analysis, approximately two years had passed since the original interviews, and most of the children (75%) had exited foster care. These analyses use information from the original study about whether the father had been identified and contacted by the child welfare agency and about the contacted fathers' level of involvement with their children, combined with administrative data about case outcomes two years later, to explore three research questions: (1) Is nonresident father involvement associated with case length? (2) Is nonresident father involvement associated with foster care discharge outcomes? and (3) Is nonresident father involvement associated with subsequent child maltreatment allegations?