Returning to the child welfare system: Understanding the wellbeing,health, education,and placement of children who return

Using longitudinal archival Child Welfare System (CWS) data, this study describes child health and wellbeing at their initial entrance into the CWS and subsequent returns. Associations between child wellbeing, health, placement stability, and frequency of returning to the system were also investigated. Results indicated most children were healthy and developmentally on target. In addition, emotional distress, behavioral concerns, and number of placements in the CWS were significantly correlated with placement stability. Future work should utilize the use of developmental assessments to systematically and reliably document the concerns for children in the system, and investigate factors contributing to stable placements.     

Dynamics of Polarizing Rhetoric in Congressional Tweets

Affective polarization is pervasive in modern US politics, and can be intensified by strategic messaging from members of Congress. But there are gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of polarizing appeals from elected representatives on social media. We explore the usage of polarizing rhetoric by members of Congress on Twitter using the 4.9 million tweets sent by members of Congress from 2009 to 2020, coded for the presence of polarizing rhetoric via a novel and highly accurate application of supervised machine learning methods. Fitting with our expectations, we find that more ideologically extreme members, those from safer districts, and those who are not in the president’s party are more likely to send polarizing tweets, and that polarizing tweets garner more engagement, increasing campaign funding for more polarizing members.