  The John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood
(CFCIP) allocates funding to provide services to youth who are likely to age
out of foster care. These services, covering everything from mentoring to
financial aid, are expected to be distributed in ways that prepare youth for
life after care. However, surprisingly little is known about which youth
receive which services. The present work makes use of the National Youth in
Transition Database (NYTD), a large-scale administrative dataset that tracks
services allocated to youth that use CFCIP funds. Specifically, we conduct a
forensic social science analysis of the NYTD data. To do so, we first use
computational methods to help us uncover the most important factors associated
with service receipt. Doing so helps us to identify three major factors-youth
age, youth time in care, and the state in which a youth is in care-that are
most heavily associated with service receive. We then conduct an analysis that
links existing theory to these factors, expanding our understanding of how
services are allocated and paving the way to future work to understand why such
associations exist.
