Wakefield Sara, Wildeman Christopher
School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA.
Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Res Soc Work Pract. 2022 Jul;32(5):499-503. doi: 10.1177/10497315211065418. Epub 2022 Jan 3.
In their provocative article, Barth and colleagues interrogate existing research on a series of claims about the child welfare system. In this reply, we focus on just one of their conclusions: that foster care placement does little, on average, to cause the poor outcomes of children who are ever placed in care. Our argument proceeds in three stages. In the first, we dispute the claim that the average effects of foster care placement on children are "settled" in any scientific sense. In the second, we note that the lack of agreement about what constitutes the appropriate counterfactual makes the idea of average effects of foster care placement in this area problematic. In the third, we problematize the idea that near-zero average effects equate to unimportant effects by showing how different types of effect heterogeneity may lead us to think differently about how the system is working.
在其颇具启发性的文章中，巴特及其同事对一系列有关儿童福利系统的说法的现有研究提出了质疑。在本回应中，我们仅聚焦于他们的一个结论：平均而言，寄养安置对曾被安置儿童的不良后果影响甚微。我们的论证分三个阶段进行。第一，我们对寄养安置对儿童的平均影响在任何科学意义上已“确定”这一说法提出质疑。第二，我们指出，对于何为合适的反事实情形缺乏共识，使得寄养安置在这一领域的平均影响这一概念存在问题。第三，我们通过展示不同类型的效应异质性如何可能使我们对该系统的运作方式有不同看法，对平均影响近乎为零等同于不重要影响这一观点提出质疑。
