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Browse Data Center publications below or filter your search using the categories to the left.
Fred Wulczyn | 2007
Using permanency outcomes for children placed in foster care (e.g., reunification or adoption), we illustrate some of the issues encountered when attempting to use baselines to establish goals and monitor progress.
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Fred Wulczyn, Lijun Chen, & Kristen Brunner Hislop | 2005
This report provides a general overview of what happens when children are placed in foster care. Because of the large number of children for whom data are collected and how the data are organized, the data provide a useful baseline for studying entry and exit patterns. In turn, the findings can be used to draw inferences related to the question, “Given admission into foster care, what is the typical trajectory of children through the system?”
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This two-day webinar focused on how to use advanced analytics to diagnose child and family outcomes that need improvement, identify opportinies for intervention, and measure the impact of implemented strategies, both programatically and fiscally.
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2012
Read this post from the Data Center’s user-support blog, Recipes, about how longitudinal data can help your agency answer questions about system performance throughout the cycle of continuous quality improvement.
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Jennifer Haight
In 2005, Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services engaged the Data Center in an effort to improve outcomes for children placed with contracted private services providers. We helped the state design and implement a performance- based contract that led to improved permanency for children and $20 million in savings to the state over five years.
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Fred Wulczyn | 2011
A great deal of work has already been done to explore racial disparity in maltreatment rates and admission to out-of-home care. However, there are still fundamental research questions and policy and practice implications that must be addressed before we can reasonably expect to make progress on such a deep and important problem. This report explores the issue of disparity and the reasons for investing more in understanding it.
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Fred Wulczyn, Michelle Ernst, Philip Fisher | 2011
Infants represent a distinctive subset of the out-of-home care population. In this Issue Brief, the authors discuss infants’ unique needs and strengths, distinguishing them from older children in terms of their experiences in out-of-home care, characteristics of the infants themselves and their birth families, and the developmental issues particular to infancy to which child welfare professionals must be attuned.
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Fred Wulczyn, Linda Collins | 2010
In this report, the authors describe a model for projecting the number of children who will turn 18 while in foster care (i.e., will age out of foster care) in the coming five years. Taking into account changes in the number of children entering care, changes in the age distribution of children entering care, and changes in how long children stay in care, the model projects that the number of children aging out of foster care will most likely decline and then level off over the next 5 years.
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Fred Wulczyn, Deborah Daro, John Fluke, Sara Feldman, Christin Glodek, and Kate Lifanda | 2010
In this collaboration between UNICEF, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, and the Child Protection Research Center (CPRC) of the American Humane Association, the authors review the existing multidisciplinary literature on systems approaches to child protection and present findings from interviews with key stakeholders engaged in creating or monitoring such systems at the international and national levels.
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Fred Wulczyn, Britany Orlebeke, Jennifer Haight | 2009
From year to year, child welfare directors allocate resources in the hope that their efforts will improve children’s outcomes. In this paper, we present a framework that state and local child welfare agencies can use to monitor their return on those investments. Focusing on traditional child welfare outcomes pertaining to child maltreatment and foster care, the goal is to burrow through the complexity involved in understanding whether system performance is improving and whether the improvements are connected to changes in how resources are invested.
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