Children at risk: outcome and cost measures needed.

Sporadic reports in the media focus on the inability of America's social welfare leadership to protect children at risk and to allocate judiciously scarce resources. These criticisms suggest the importance of arriving at valid conclusions in both socio-psychological and economic terms so that human service specialists can evaluate the efficacy of three key strategies used for children at risk: reunification, foster care; and adoption. Rather than continuing to modify public policy without much empirical evidence, this article calls for creating a comprehensive data base that supplies the most critical treatment variables leading to reasonable successes and to the average cost per case when comparing children reunified with a biological parent to those who are placed into out-of-home settings and to those who are adopted. This proposed analysis should include public and private expenditures for the services provided by human services-welfare, special education, judicial, correctional, mental health, medical, and other related organizations.