CONTEXT Screening children for social determinants of health (SDOHs) has gained attention in recent years, but there is a deficit in understanding the present state of the science. OBJECTIVE To systematically review SDOH screening tools used with children, examine their psychometric properties, and evaluate how they detect early indicators of risk and inform care. DATA SOURCES Comprehensive electronic search of PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Web of Science Core Collection. STUDY SELECTION Studies in which a tool that screened children for multiple SDOHs (defined according to Healthy People 2020) was developed, tested, and/or employed. DATA EXTRACTION Extraction domains included study characteristics, screening tool characteristics, SDOHs screened, and follow-up procedures. RESULTS The search returned 6274 studies. We retained 17 studies encompassing 11 screeners. Study samples were diverse with respect to biological sex and race and/or ethnicity. Screening was primarily conducted in clinical settings with a parent or caregiver being the primary informant for all screeners. Psychometric properties were assessed for only 3 screeners. The most common SDOH domains screened included the family context and economic stability. Authors of the majority of studies described referrals and/or interventions that followed screening to address identified SDOHs. LIMITATIONS Following the Healthy People 2020 SDOH definition may have excluded articles that other definitions would have captured. CONCLUSIONS The extent to which SDOH screening accurately assessed a child’s SDOHs was largely unevaluated. Authors of future research should also evaluate if referrals and interventions after the screening effectively address SDOHs and improve child well-being.

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Child welfare jurisdictions increasingly place foster children with kinship foster parents as a means of meeting their need for stability, family connection, and behavioral and emotional support. However, the lack of financial and educational assistance provided to kin by child welfare authorities often undermines these caregivers’ ability to provide effective and lasting care for the children in their homes. This study uses a mixed-methods approach to understand how formal training and licensure processes can aid kinship foster parents in facilitating positive outcomes for children and youth in the foster care system. Specifically, we investigated the barriers experienced by kinship foster parents while trying to access existing licensure-based training and supports, as well as the initial outcomes of a kin-tailored licensure training curriculum alternatingly administered in in-person and virtual delivery formats. Participants reported that incomplete or inaccurate communication about licensing processes, practical difficulties in attending training, irrelevant session content, and stringent licensing requirements acted as barriers to accessing these resources. However, participants in the kin-specific licensure training administered in this study reported high levels of learning related to key parenting competencies and increased awareness of kinship permanency supports, although these outcomes appeared to be less pronounced among those receiving the training in a virtual format. These findings suggest that researchers and policymakers should consider developing, implementing, and evaluating further initiatives to provide accessible and tailored supports to kinship foster parents as a means of improving outcomes for the children in their care.

Identifying treatment moderators of a trauma-informed parenting intervention with children in foster care: Using model-based recursive partitioning

This article is an exposition of the joint-modeling approach to testing intervention effects through the harmonization of longitudinal and timeto-event data. We demonstrate the advantages of the joint-modeling approach over the classical approach of separately analyzing these types of outcome data. Method: We used a subset of 150 participants from the Illinois Birth through Three Title IV-E Waiver intervention study, which collected longitudinal Devereux Early Childhood Assessment for Infants and Toddlers (DECA-I/T) scores and time-to-permanence data for up to 3 years. We ran and contrasted three competing models: Cox proportional hazard, linear mixed-effects, and joint modeling. Results: If analyzed separately, the DECA-I/T scores are highly nonsignificantly related to time to permanence ( p 5 :929). However, when analyzed jointly, the significance level drops 88 percentage points, from .929 to .105. Because of its efficiency in addressing information loss when longitudinal and survival data are incorporated together, the joint model properly accounts for outcome-dependent missingness. Conclusion: This article highlights the utility of joint modeling in randomized longitudinal intervention studies by demonstrating its ability to preserve information from both longitudinal and time-to-event data, produce unbiased estimates, and retain higher statistical power than the traditional approach.