AbstractsSocial Work

The purpose of this study to identify service utilization, desire of services and helpfulness associated with adoption dissolution that exist in families who adopt children from foster care. This may lead to suggestions of ways community and child welfare agencies can better support local adoptive families with appropriate services through their adoption journey with the goal of lowering dissolution rates. Secondary data is used for the current study and was obtained through the CDC from a 2007 study for the National Survey of Adopted Children. Parents of 2,089 families were interviewed via telephone. The current study focused on 766 families who adopted their child from the United States Foster Care system. Nineteen families out of 766 indicated during the survey that they had considered dissolution and their use or desire of services is compared to 19 randomly selected families from the 747, who had indicated never considering dissolution. The findings from this study indicated there is a statistically significant difference in utilization of services among families who had considered dissolution and the non-dissolution families who indicated not wanting or desiring to access services. The three services that had a statistically significant difference in helpfulness included mental health services for the child, family counseling, and meeting with an adoption agency for post adoption services and support. Families who had considered dissolution found these three services less helpful at addressing the targeted concerns compared to families who did not consider dissolution. The topic of adoption dissolution is a scarcely studied subject in the area of social work and true numbers of dissolution occurrences are difficult to track. It is the hope through this thesis project that service needs and access rates will support a change in how we view post-adoption families.