ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine the effect of family, child, and foster care characteristics on the likelihood that foster children will be adopted and of the timeliness of transitions that take place in the movement toward adoption. Special-needs adoption is a cornerstone of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act. The relationship between preplacement preventive services and later adoption is significant but relatively small and hard to interpret. The effect of the interaction between ethnicity and initial placement type on the odds of adoption is striking. The analysis of the likelihood of a timely adoption is based on a sample of 496 children drawn from 1,369 adoptions in the California Long-Range Adoption Study. "Legal risk adoption,' or "fost-adoption," has grown in use from its once controversial origins. Fost-adoption involves the placement of children into foster homes with the explicit intention of adoption if reunification of the child with the birth parent fails.
