The Continuum of Care System

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe Continuum of Care system1 began several years ago as a research project to study the differences among children placed in various types of out-of-home care, e.g:, foster family care, basic child care, group homes, and residential treatment centers. One of the project's initial goals was to examine the feasibility of developing a computer model of the residential child care senrice delivery system, based on the characteristics of a sample of children admitted to each of the different types of residential care facilities.The statistical technique of discriminant analysis and classification was found to do a better-than-expected job of differentiating children in the individual facilities providing different types of care. Moreover, the model's classifications of individual children into particular facilities were judged by practitioners expert in the field of child placement to be appropriate to the service needs of children.Based on these findings, two software packages were developed to provide child placement practitioners with direct access to this information. The first software package, MATCH, enables practitioners to interactively enter the characteristics of a child in need of residential care and, in seconds, to receive a list of alternative programs for the child, which is rank ordered according to the degree of similarity between the child for whom placement is being sought A. James Schwab and Susan S. Wilson are affiliated with the School of Social Work, The University of Texas at Austin. Downloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 21:33 04 February 2015 124 A CASEBOOK OF COMPUTER APPLICATIONSand other children already admitted to each of the listed programs. The list of alternatives can then be used by the practitioner to selectively apply for admission to those residential programs that are likely to accept the child into placement. Frequently, the list of prospective programs includes alternatives that a practitioner had not already considered.The second software package, PROFILE, provides a comparative analysis of the children accepted into placement at each of the facilities included in the study. PROFILE can be used to identify which facilities accept children with specific characteristics such as low IQ, history of fire-setting, running away or drug abuse.PROFILE has provided valuable feedback to facility administrators who participate in the project, enabling them to-compare the population of youth they serve with youth served in other residential programs. In a number of cases, this information has been used in budget documentation to detail the unique features of a program's service population.MATCH is currently in its third revision and PROFILE is being revised for the second time. Suggestions for revisions and features have come both from practitioners directly and from project staff responsible for training practitioners to use the software. In our experience, many practitioners avoid using the programs directly because of limited skills in touch-typing and lack of fa...