ABSTRACT
Interest in the length of time children and youth spend in the foster care system is long-standing. The study by Henry Maas and Richard Engler reported in the book Children in Need of Parents, must be considered the first call to arms against "foster care drift." It is also the most prominent cross-sectional study of length of time in care. There have been other efforts to examine how long children spend in foster care and what factors are associated with their length of stay. Many of these have attempted to avoid the pitfalls of point-in-time estimates, relying instead on longitudinal scrutiny of a cohort of children as they move through foster care or retrospective examination of the paths through care of an entry cohort. Nearly all research conducted after 1980 into foster care duration has employed event-history analysis. It is possible to examine event-history data by using methods that make no assumptions about how hazard rates change over time.
