ABSTRACT
In this chapter we consider the progress of the most disruptive children in our sample. These children would probably once have been placed in institutional care but, because of the forces described in Chapter 3, find themselves these days in the foster care system. For the purposes of this chapter, disruptiveness has been defined as a minimum of two placement breakdowns due to behaviour over the life of the study. We set criterion at two breakdowns because of the high rate of false positives recorded in case files (see also Chapter 12). In other words, it was common for social workers to record ‘disruptive behaviour’ as the reason for terminating a placement when the situation was either more complex than that or was merely a case of incompatibility between child and foster carer. However, when disruptive behaviour was mentioned as the cause on more than one occasion, the problem of false positives disappeared and a sub-group of fifty children clearly satisfied the selection criterion.
