Rate My Professor Kevin White

Kevin White is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Director of Child Welfare at East Carolina University. With over thirteen years of research experience, his work centers on understanding and improving safety, permanency, and well-being for at-risk youth and their families, particularly those involved in the public child welfare system, including youth adopted from foster care. Prior to academia, Dr. White spent thirteen years in practice as a child welfare caseworker and school social worker, which shaped his research interests. He holds a B.S. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.S. in Data Science from Eastern University, an M.S.W. in Social Work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. White has served as an investigator or evaluator on several multi-year federally funded projects, including the Permanency Innovations Initiative, the National Quality Improvement Center for Adoption and Guardianship Support and Preservation, and the Understanding Post Adoption and Guardianship Instability project. He is a regular attendee and presenter at the Society for Social Work and Research.

Dr. White's scholarly contributions include numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and reports. Key publications feature 'Belonging in adoptive families: Perspectives of Young adults and adoptive parents' (Adoption Quarterly, 2025), 'Clinical child behavior challenges and post adoption instability: A multivariable analysis using propensity score weighting' (Journal of Child and Family Studies, 2025), 'Perceived sense of closeness and belonging for relative versus nonrelative adoptive families' (Family Relations, 2025), 'Motivations to adopt: Perspectives from young adult adoptees and adoptive parents' (Families in Society, 2024), and 'Exploring fidelity to client treatment recommendations in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT)' (Research on Social Work Practice, 2023). His research has advanced evidence-based solutions for post-permanency stability and family well-being. Among his honors, Dr. White was selected as a 2026 Fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research and received the Sam and Betsy Reeves Doctoral Fellowship from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014.