Even before outcome studies became an established research genre
with the publication of How Foster Children Turn Out, some
agencies involved in placing-out tried to follow up on their own
cases. What had become of the children formerly in their care?
Finding out served two important and related purposes. It would
improve the practices that shaped child and family life by
establishing the need for minimum standards and it would define
social work as a job worthy of being designated a profession. In
this early study, the Boston Children’s Aid Society tracked its
own work. Dismayed by the haphazard techniques used to place
children and appalled by family-making failures, the agency
added a researcher, Ruth Lawton, to its staff in 1913 in hopes
that empirical inquiry “might be able to establish certain
standards by which we could measure our own work.” She found the
agency’s own records distressingly thin, containing too few
details to be of value. “Many of the children were taken on
meagre information, often en