Yanfeng Xu

University of South Carolina | USC · College of Social Work

Beginning in the 18th century, Asian Americans have experienced persistent racism, marginalizing stereotyping, microaggressions, verbal and physical attacks, hate crimes, and harassments driven by individual-level racism and institutional reinforcement. This volume systemically examines the experience and impact of racism from the perspective of As...

Background: Youth aging out of the child welfare system lack support in accessing needed mental health care, as do youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth in the general population. Similar disparities may exist among youth aging out of foster care who hold intersecting social identities. Objective: This study aimed to explore the presence of mental health...

This study explored facilitators of and barriers to mental health services for children in foster care in a Southeastern state. We thematically analyzed 10 interviews with foster parents. Throughout the interviews, a wide range of facilitators and barriers that promote the use of mental health services among children in foster care at the child wel...

Introduction: Anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are some of the most common conditions that youths (<18 years old) receive mental health treatment for. These conditions are associated with high-risk substance use or substance use disorders (SUDs). This study sought to identify the proportio...

Placement instability for children in foster care is high, with children experiencing nearly 4.5 placement moves per 1,000 days in care on average. While prior research has demonstrated a predictive relationship between mental health problems and placement instability, few studies have examined the associations of specific mental health diagnoses o...

Kinship care is a preferred living arrangement for children when they have to separate from their birth parents due to various reasons. Although kinship care emphasized family and cultural value of connection, kinship families haven been considered as a vulnerable population since they often face myriad and longstanding challenges on both caregiver...

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This study examined the associations of grandparent-grandchild relational closeness and conflict with grandchildren's socioemotional and behavioral problems, including emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer problems, and abnormal prosocial behaviors. We analyzed primary cross-sectional survey data collected from custodial grandpa...

Due to COVID-19, many schools switched to remote instruction, creating an urgency to address the technology needs of many families, including grandparent-headed families. Many grandparent-headed families (i.e., custodial grandparents) have limited access to digital devices and stable internet. Moreover, many of these grandparents lack the skills an...

This scoping review aimed to identify predisposing, enabling, and need factors associated with the use of mental health services, including psychotropic medications, among children in out-of-home care in the United States. We searched the PsycInfo, SocINDEX, Medline, and Scopus databases, and 22 studies met inclusion criteria and were systematicall...

Background: Approximately one in ten children globally live with kinship caregivers—relatives and family friends who step in to care for a child when parents are unable to do so. When families take on the role of informal kinship care—care of a child outside of the child welfare system—they often do so without financial assistance and advice in nav...

The critique that child welfare services (CWS) are primarily focused on neglect cases resulting from poverty is longstanding and reemerging from discussions about how to address America’s racial history and structural oppression which begets poverty. Understanding how poverty and CWS involvement operate requires testing relationships between povert...

Parenting has a significant impact on adolescent well-being, particularly subjective psychological well-being. This study investigated the relationship between parenting and adolescents' subjective psychological well-being in fragile families and whether immigration background moderated these associations, using data from the Fragile Families and C...

The Oxford Handbook of Family Policy Over the Life Course examines how countries devised measures for child protection outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UNCRC highlights the importance of protecting children from a range of human rights violations. In response, countries respond differently to human r...

The Oxford Handbook of Family Policy Over the Life Course examines how countries devised measures for child protection outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UNCRC highlights the importance of protecting children from a range of human rights violations. In response, countries respond differently to human r...

Children of color—especially Black and Indigenous children—are disproportionately overrepresented in foster care and experience barriers in accessing services and receiving physical and behavioral healthcare compared to their White counterparts. Although racial disparities in mental health outcomes of children in foster care have been examined syst...

During COVID-19, custodial grandparents experienced symptoms of depression due to social isolation, and technology use may reduce depression. This study examines the association between level of comfort of using technology and depression among custodial grandparents. Cross-sectional survey data (N = 287) were collected via multiple sources, includi...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated racism against racial minorities and widened racial/ethnic disparities in health outcomes and access to health care services. This study analyzed cross-sectional data (N=219) collected from custodial grandparents via Qualtrics Panels in February 2022 to understand the role of race and perceived racial discrimin...

Family Team Decision Meeting (FTDM) aims to engage families whose children are involved in the child welfare system. This study seeks to understand differences in participants’ satisfaction with FTDM and further examine disparities in offering child welfare services to families who participate in FTDM. Logistic regression results indicated that par...

While securing data integrity has been a growing issue with online surveys for over a decade, recent cyber threats to online research, particularly survey bots, have escalated dramatically (Griffin et al., 2022; Pozzar et al., 2020; Storozuk et al., 2020). Survey bots, also known as automated form fillers, are computer programs that fill out web-ba...

Background Child maltreatment reporting is critical for case investigation and service disposition. However, reporting discrepancies across informants is a challenge for child welfare services. Methods Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n = 3150), the current study examined child-caregiver discrepancies in reporting th...

[Acess link: https://rdcu.be/cbdqX] Purpose: Grandparent kinship caregivers may experience increased parenting stress and mental distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. It may lead to risky parenting behaviors, such as psychological aggression, corporal punishment, and neglectful behaviors towards their grandchildren. This study aims to examine (1)...

This paper investigated how daily trips are associated with multidimensional disadvantages in demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, transportation barriers, and internet use based on the 2017 U.S. National Household Travel Survey. We examined how these disadvantages affected weekday and weekend trips for work, recreation, and social pa...

This study examined predisposing, enabling, and need factors associated with mental health (MH) services, the use of school-based, medical-based and specialty MH services, and the use of ≥ 2 MH services among children in kinship care. We analyzed a sample of children in kinship care (N = 718) selected from wave II of the National Survey on Child an...

Grandparents caring for grandchildren has increased globally in the past two decades, but we have a limited understanding of its effects on custodial grandchildren’s mental/behavioral health and educational outcomes. This mixed methods systematic review aims to synthesize mental/behavioral health and educational outcomes of custodial grandchildren...

Purpose: This systematic review aims to examine the effectiveness of interventions that seek to improve outcomes of grandchildren raised by grandparents. Method: A systematic review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines was undertaken. We searched in ERIC, Family Studies Abstracts, PubMed, PsycI...

Purpose Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, social workers have participated in fighting the virus in interprofessional teams. This exploratory study examined social workers’ experiences in interprofessional practice during the early stage of combating COVID-19. Method We used a purposive sampling strategy to recruit social workers. Ten semi-...

COVID-19 has increased economic hardship for many families, including custodial grandparent-headed families. We aim to examine latent classes of material hardship among custodial grandparent-headed families, to assess predictors associated with identified classes, and to investigate associations with grandchildren’s physical and mental health outco...

This symposium presents a collection of papers that examine the concept of social support and its effect on custodial grandparents’ (CG) mental health state. Each paper explores a different perspective about grandparents’ access to and/or use of social support networks and mental health outcomes; several papers view social support within the contex...

COVID-19 has increased economic hardship for many families, including custodial grandparent-headed families. We aim to examine latent classes of material hardship among custodial grandparent-headed families, to assess predictors associated with identified classes, and to investigate associations with grandchildren’s physical and mental health outco...

This study aims to examine the (1) prevalence of ACEs among children in kinship care; (2) relationships between the number and type of ACEs and children’s internalizing and externalizing problems; and (3) the moderating role of kinship caregivers’ mental health on the relationships between ACEs and children’s internalizing and externalizing problem...

Background COVID-19 has exacerbated material hardship among grandparent-headed kinship families. Grandparent-headed kinship families receive financial assistance, which may mitigate material hardship and reduce child neglect risk. Objective This study aims to examine (1) the association between material hardship and child neglect risk; and (2) whe...

Background: Mandatory reporting is new in China, and barefoot social workers are responsible for detecting and reporting child maltreatment. Objective: Guided by the decision-making ecology, this study examined factors associated with barefoot social workers’ decision making in assessing and reporting child physical abuse in China. Participants and...

COVID‐19 and its related policy measures have increased the psychological distress of individuals, including grandparent kinship caregivers. Guided by the Resilience Model of Family Stress, Adjustment, and Adaptation, this study examines relationships between material hardship, parenting stress, social support, resilience and psychological distress...

Across the United States, more than 2.5 million children are being raised in the homes of grandparents or other relatives. This is called “kinship care”—loved ones caring for a child when the parents are unable to do so. Research shows that children fare better when placed with family rather than in foster care. Yet, when families take on this care...

Involuntary job loss during the COVID-19 pandemic adds challenges, especially for custodial grandparents that are taking care of grandchildren. Grandparents are relatively vulnerable, and they need more attention and support when facing the negative impacts of COVID-19. This study analyzed cross-sectional survey data collected from 234 custodial gr...

The child welfare system helps children experiencing abuse, neglect, and other problems experience safe and permanent living environments. Children who enter this system often present co-occurring emotional/behavioral disorders, as well as compromised learning, often associated with the experience of trauma. There are several barriers and challenge...

The government’s contracting out of foster care services in Guangzhou, China, introduced the possibility of partnerships between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government-led human services. To understand network governance among actors involved in contracting out foster care services, service funders, service providers, and service users...

The fear and anxiety of COVID-19 and its related policy measures have increased individuals’ psychological distress. The objective of this study was to examine relationships between material hardship, parenting stress, social support, and resilience and custodial grandparents’ psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and further investig...

[Published in Child Abuse and Neglect] The COVID 19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of many families, including grandparent kinship families, to deal with a health/economic crisis. The fear of COVID-19 plus stay-at-home orders have increased individuals’ psychological distress. Moreover, school closures and homeschooling further increased pa...

The risk of child maltreatment is heightened during the pandemic due to multiple COVID-19 related stressors, such as physical and mental health concerns, economic stress, challenges in homeschooling, marital conflicts and intimate partner violence, and intensified child-parent relationships. Both parental internal (e.g., parenting styles) and exter...

Single parents face unique transportation barriers in their lives. Although helping single parents obtain private vehicles (e.g., car donation programs) would be a potential solution, we cannot ignore the high expense of maintaining and operating a vehicle, which may impose a heavy financial burden on single-parent families and constrain their abil...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of many families, including grandparent kinship families, to deal with a health/economic crisis. The fear of COVID-19 plus stay-at-home orders have increased individuals’ psychological distress. Moreover, school closures and homeschooling further increased parenting stress among caregiv...

Purpose: This study aimed to examine (1) the effects of early exposure to neighborhood disorder and fathers’ early involvement on children’s long-term internalizing and externalizing problems, and (2) whether fathers’ early involvement buffered effects of early exposure to neighborhood disorder on children’s internalizing and externalizing problems...

The type of care setting a child is placed in when they enter the child welfare system has long-lasting effects. Although numerous studies have examined factors associated with placement decisions and placement moves, few studies have paid attention to factors involved in both placing children into and removing children from kinship care. This stud...

About half of kinship families live in poverty, and one-third of them receive financial assistance such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and foster care payments. This study selected children who remained in kinship care (N =267) for three waves from nationally representative data and examined the longitudinal associations among po...

Although family-centered practice has been implemented nationwide in child welfare, measures for evaluating family-centered practice have not been well-established. This study aimed to evaluate the factor structure of the Family-Centered Practice Questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the factor structure of the Famil...

Background: Children in kinship care may be placed in similar neighborhoods as their birth families, which are predominantly characterized as distressed neighborhoods with high poverty and crime rates, poor-quality housing conditions, and few social resources. Disordered neighborhoods are negatively correlated to social support, but this dynamic ma...

Financial hardship is one of the most challenging issues faced by kinship foster care families. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits and foster care payments are potential sources of financial assistance for kinship families. This study used wave 2 of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being II (NSCAW II) to develop...

Child maltreatment has become a recognized social problem in China. However, the target of foster care is primarily children who are orphans, abandoned, and disabled but not maltreated children. Responding to child maltreatment, an alternative care system to place children in out-of-home care should be established. This study used a scoping review...

Background The neglect of children is a serious global problem. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was a major international achievement spurring national efforts to prevent and address neglect. However, the scope of neglect worldwide and progress in addressing it remain unclear. Objective This analysis assessed th...

Background A significant proportion of children placed in out of-home care experience placement disruptions in the United States. Placement instability has deleterious effects on children’s well-being. Objectives (a) To measure the time-to-initial placement change in different types of settings, including non-relative foster homes, kinship care,...

There has been much discussion about the contributions of qualitative research to social work knowledge, but the experiences of social work faculty engaged in qualitative research are rarely discussed. Social work is at the early developmental stage in China, which makes the country a useful laboratory to examine this question. The current study ai...

Book review

The purpose of this systematic review is to compare the associations of kinship care and non-kinship care with children's mental health and to examine the factors associated with children's mental health in kinship care and non-kinship foster care. A comprehensive search was conducted in nine databases, and 237 articles were identified yielding eig...

This study conducted a survey among social workers in a mid-Atlantic state in the U.S. and examined the relationship between self-care behaviors, self-care barriers and compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress (STS) from an ecological perspective. The study found that social workers had a moderate level of compassion satisfa...

Retention of the estimated 30,000 U.S. volunteer community mediators is critical to provision of high-quality services. Although workers’ retention and burnout is well researched, retention of volunteers such as community mediators is less understood. Survey data of 53 volunteer mediators were analyzed. For volunteer mediators, burnout and intent t...

A recent study estimated that over one‐fourth of Chinese children have suffered maltreatment (Fang et al., 2015 ). However, the current child welfare policy in China is limited to orphans, abandoned children, and children with disabilities. Also, there is very little comparative research in China on Chinese and other countries’ child welfare system...

Family Group Decision Making (FGDM) is a strategy to engage family members and social service professionals in child welfare to make decisions for the child and family (Olson, 2009). Family Involvement Meeting (FIM) is a mid-Atlantic state implementation of FGDM in the United States. The current study sample is comprised of 460 participants who att...