Development of a measure to assess foster/adoptive caregiver perceived readiness to care for youth who identify as LGBTQ+

LGBTQ+ youth in foster care experience greater placement instability and more challenging outcomes in early adulthood than their non-LGBTQ+ peers. Caregivers are crucial to LGBTQ+ youths’ well-being and overall placement success, yet there is a lack of instruments that assess the readiness of caregivers to fill this role. This study has two goals. First, it introduces the Caregiver Perceived Readiness to Care for LGBTQ+ Youth Scale, which we found via an exploratory factor analysis to have a one-factor solution and high internal reliability (α = 0.893). This measure is a promising tool for training and screening both prospective and experienced caregivers, as well as assessing placement fit. Second, this study assesses whether other trainable caregiver characteristics are associated with caregiver perceived readiness to care for LGBTQ+ youth. We found that of the 11 characteristics assessed, 10 had a statistically significant association with LGBTQ+ youth readiness (e.g., trauma-informed parenting, cultural receptivity, ability to support positive development of youth) after controlling for key demographics. Future studies could investigate whether trainable characteristics like these tend to increase in tandem as a result of training, and/or if trainings that target these other factors also increase caregivers’ readiness to care for LGBTQ+ youth.