Introducing: Hot Spot
Hot Spot is an analytic tool available to members of The Center for State Child Welfare Data via the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive (FCDA) web tool. For each member state, Hot Spot uses a risk-adjustment method to calculate the extent to which a county’s performance on a particular outcome differs from the state and national performance after controlling for influential child- and county-level factors.
In this way, Hot Spot allows states to compare counties to one another on a more “level the playing field,” providing child welfare administrators with knowledge about which populations of children within the state have better and worse than average outcomes, all other things being equal. Such information is invaluable as states aim to target performance improvement resources toward groups of children who need them most.
Data Center members can find Hot Spot in the menu bar of the Multistate FCDA web tool. In the Hot Spot User Guide, you will find:
A concise overview of the information that Hot Spot reports provide and why that information is relevant to child welfare agencies’ decisions about how to allocate resources toward outcome improvement efforts.- A brief primer on risk-adjustment.
- Information on how Hot Spot results can be applied to the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) process.
- Instructions for how to run and interpret Hot Spot reports.
- Detail on the analytic specifications for Hot Spot calculations.
Our portal for publically available data contains Hot Spot reports for participating states. To go directly to the User Guide, click here.
Not a member of the Data Center? Contact us to learn more about membership and how to develop Hot Spot reports for your state.