Ethan and Justin are Co-Investigators on two TAY-Hub supported projects: County-level Variations in Transition-age Youth’s Utilization of Independent Living Programs, and Expectant and Parenting Youth in Foster Care.

What brought you to this research?

Justin: I was involved in the child welfare system myself as a young person, and that drove a desire to get my MSW and become a caseworker in Chicago. I found that there was not enough focus on transition-aged youth, and even less focus on parents or expecting parents in that group. I felt like I was always putting on band-aids in my practice and not making long-lasting change, so I went to do my PhD with a focus on this population and never looked back.

Ethan: I wouldn’t call myself a child welfare scholar; I study systems and organizations to understand how they work. I did my undergrad in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, so I’m comfortable working with big data sets. When I met with Mark Courtney (then of CalYOUTH, now the lead at TAY-Hub) and saw all the caseworker-level and county-level data that was being collected but not analyzed I started to become interested in the child welfare system.

How do you manage to work together coming from such different perspectives?

Justin: Think about what we call corporate parenting – when a child is removed from their family and the state has to step in as the parent. That comes with a lot of obligations for the state, and I’m interested in how they’re doing, are the different parts of the state aligning to help the young person. With TAY, there’s an additional responsibility to prepare for adulthood. I understand intimately how that works because of my research and lived experience, but Ethan is able to help me look at the child welfare system as a system.

Ethan: It’s all about bringing different skills and perspectives to the work. Like Justin said, I’m interested in looking at the whole system, doing population analysis, survey analysis, etc. But looking at the quantitative data really is incomplete because you need someone like Justin with the lived and practical experience of the system to validate or challenge the analysis. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s beautiful.

Justin: It really is, and the thing that Ethan can help provide is context. So let’s say we have some finding that makes logical sense to me, and the data seem to back it up – but bringing in additional context (for example, housing prices in an area with high youth homelessness) can really change the way we see the world.

What do you hope to influence with your work?

Ethan: This is a place where TAY-Hub is so useful. In somewhere like California where you have dozens of different county agencies all collecting data, trying to do new things, but unsure of where to focus, TAY-Hub gives them a place to bring the research and practice together in a way that’s useful.

Justin: It’s all about making the research usable for the practitioners. Academic research sits behind paywalls and often isn’t geared towards the people on the ground doing the work, so working with TAY-Hub to turn that research into action is critical.