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Kinship Foster Care and School Adjustment: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample of Children in Out-of-Home Care in South Korea

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Abstract

Background

There are many appealing reasons to support kinship foster care as an alternative to other types of out-of-home care. In South Korea, however, less is known about whether or not kinship foster care is beneficial for children’s development, and nothing is known about how kinship foster care compares with other types of out-of-home care in terms of its associations with children’s developmental outcomes.

Objective

This study aimed to examine the associations between kinship foster care and children’s school adjustment, which were separately compared with institutional and group home care.

Methods

This study used data from a nationally representative sample of 414 children in out-of-home care in South Korea and employed propensity score weighting to address selection bias.

Results

The main analyses revealed that the children in kinship foster care showed more bonding to school and less misbehavior at school than the children in institutional care. Children in grandparent foster care also showed more bonding to school than those in group home care. Interaction analyses suggested that the associations between specific types of kinship foster care and children’s school adjustment varied by the child’s gender and the presence of a biological father.

Conclusions

Implications for research, policy, and practice to improve the healthy development of children in out-of-home care were discussed based upon the results.

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Acknowledegments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A3A2055259). This work was also supported by the Soonchunhyang University Research Fund. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NRF or the Soonchunhyang University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Hyang-seol Nanum, Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Republic of Korea

    RaeHyuck Lee

  2. Department of Social Welfare, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    JongSerl Chun, Ick-Joong Chung & Choong Rai Nho

  3. Division of Child Welfare, SookMyung Women’s University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Hyunah Kang

  4. Department of Economics, Myongji University, 34 Geobukgol-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, 03674, Republic of Korea

    Seokjin Woo

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  1. RaeHyuck Lee
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  2. JongSerl Chun
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  3. Ick-Joong Chung
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  4. Hyunah Kang
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  5. Choong Rai Nho
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seokjin Woo.

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Conflict of interest

Author RaeHyuck Lee declares that he has no conflict of interest. Author Hyunah Kang declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This study does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics for covariates before and after IPTW
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Lee, R., Chun, J., Chung, IJ. et al. Kinship Foster Care and School Adjustment: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample of Children in Out-of-Home Care in South Korea. Child Youth Care Forum 46, 335–356 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-016-9380-z

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