Success on Their Own Terms: Youths’ Perspectives on Successful Foster Care

Foster care is an integral component of the child welfare system. However, little is known about factors germane to conceptualizing successful foster care. This study utilized Concept Mapping (CM) to delineate a conceptual domain for what success in foster care means from the perspective of those most impacted: foster youth. CM couples multi-dimensional scaling with hierarchical cluster analyses to form factors relevant to an area of study. Pictorial representations of the data were generated using the Concept Systems software. Results indicate that youth conceptualize success based on several distinct domains. The final analyses yielded a multi-cluster solution, or Concept Map.