Abstract
We analyze Illinois families facing multiple barriers and their interactions with public-sector services. Using administrative data from five state agencies to identify families’ receipt of child welfare, mental health, and substance abuse services as well as adult and juvenile incarcerations, we identify individuals across systems using probabilistic record-linkage techniques, defining family clusters based on networks of individuals who share child welfare and food stamp cases. We show that 23 percent receive services in two or more of these areas. This concentration accounts for 86 percent of the funding for these services used by the entire sample. They experience more and more severe problems. This population is otherwise heterogeneous, engaging with different types of services and clustered in certain parts of the state.
- © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Goerge, Robert M., and Emily R. Wiegand. 2019. “Understanding Vulnerable Families in Multiple Service Systems.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(2): 86–104. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.2.05. We gratefully acknowledge Cheryl Smithgall, Roopa Seshadri, and Peter Ballard for assistance with the data preparation and analyses described in this article. We also thank our agency partners at the Illinois Department of Human Services, Illinois Department of Child and Family Services, Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, and Illinois Department of Corrections for their collaboration and support, which made this study possible. Direct correspondence to: Robert M. Goerge at rgoerge{at}chapinhall.org, 1313 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637; and Emily R. Wiegand at ewiegand{at}chapinhall.org, 1313 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.