Category: Data Center Research

By: Emily Coddington, Associate Director, Wisconsin Association of Family & Children’s Agencies In a previous post, we described how the Data Center’s EDGE training program improved research evidence use capability among child welfare administrators. A number of those agencies are members of the Wisconsin Association of Family & Children’s Agencies (WAFCA), a trade organization that represents child and family serving agencies across the state. In this guest post, WAFCA’s Associate Director, Emily Coddington, talks about how, after participating in EDGE, member agencies leveraged WAFCA’s support to put what they learned into action.  We draw attention to WAFCA’s work to highlight the role professional organizations can play in supporting their member agencies to advance best practice measurement. The case study below is very much a story about private organizations achieving together what they might not have been able to achieve on their own. In this case, a committed group of agency… Read more >

By Lily Alpert, Fred Wulczyn, Molly Van Drunen, Scott Huhr, and Kristen Hislop Several years ago, the W.T. Grant Foundation supported the Center for State Child Welfare Data to conduct a randomized control trial of our research evidence use (REU) training program, EDGE: Evidence-Driven Growth & Excellence. The project falls under the Foundation’s interest in interventions that advance REU among child and family serving organizations. In short, if REU is associated with improved outcomes for children and families, as emerging research suggests it is,[i],[ii] then agencies will be wise to invest in professional development programs that improve REU among their staff. To that end, EDGE aims to improve REU among leaders and managers of child welfare agencies. Our study took place in a state where counties contract with private agencies to provide care and placement to children in foster care. We delivered EDGE to representatives from twelve such agencies—seven in… Read more >

Reassessing Youth Villages’ Intercept® Program with Recent Data Following their report from last year, Scott Huhr and Fred Wulczyn report findings from their reassessment on the impact of Intercept using Tennessee DCS administrative data to examine a more recent period.  Intercept is an intensive in-home services program that targets families with children at risk of placement.   Key features of the program include program intensity (meeting with families an average of three times weekly), low staff caseloads of 4 – 5 families, active 24/7 on-call structure, and structured weekly supervision and consultation from a licensed clinician who is an expert in the model.  The state of Tennessee, which offers Intercept in various counties around the state, commissioned the study.  As before, results indicate that Intercept does significantly reduce the odds of placement. You can download the Executive Summary, or read below. You can also download the full paper here. Executive Summary… Read more >

In this report, findings from the evaluation of Youth Villages’ Intercept® program will be shared.  Intercept is an intensive in-home services program that targets families with children at risk of placement. Results indicate that Intercept does significantly reduce the odds of placement, especially during the 3-6 months post-referral.  Findings also suggest that the effects are sustained up to one year after the intervention ends.... Read more >

Read about the latest addition to the Data Center’s family of resources: longitudinal administrative data on foster homes. In this report, we demonstrate the potential of administrative data to contribute robust evidence in support of child welfare systems’ efforts to maintain a stable supply of high-quality foster homes.... Read more >

In the Data Center’s latest webinar we discussed the use of the CAT-MH™ - a web-based assessment tool that can diagnose and report on the mental health of young people in the child welfare system in a matter of minutes. ... Read more >

The latest study from Data Center researchers - conducted in collaboration with the Annie E. Casey Foundation - explores how child characteristics, placement history, and county characteristics influence the likelihood of adolescents exiting to permanency or non-permanency.... Read more >

The Center for State Child Welfare Data latest research suggests that representing foster care outcomes using a multivariate linear model may fall short of capturing the complex dynamics that shape what happens to children, when, and why. ... Read more >

Guest Blogger Susan Dreyfus, President and CEO of the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, reflects on the importance of the finding that the more agencies rely on research evidence the better outcomes they achieve for children in care.... Read more >

Read the research brief to learn more about this study, implications for staff development, and avenues for further research.... Read more >