ABSTRACT
This chapter offers direction for incorporating measures of child well-being into evaluations of success for family foster care. It discusses the need for these measures and the reasons that they have not been incorporated into administrative databases, describes the ways that child well-being has been conceptualized and measured in research that has focused on children living in family foster care. The chapter discusses the essential dimensions that should be included in a useful measure of child well-being. Researchers have created global measures of overall functioning to evaluate levels of child well-being in family foster care. Using systematic measures of well-being would allow child welfare systems to establish baseline data and compare trends in the well-being of children in family foster care over time. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges in incorporating measures of child well-being into ongoing evaluations of family foster care to guide policy and practice into the next century.
