Publications Archive

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Adapting a Systems Approach to Child Protection: Key Concepts and Considerations

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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Finding the Return on Investment: A Framework for Monitoring Local Child Welfare Agencies

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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Adoption Dynamics: An Update on the Impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act

Fred Wulczyn, Kristen Brunner Hislop, Lijun Chen | 2005
Among all of the provisions included in the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), those that relate to the termination of parental rights and adoption are perhaps most central to the law’s overarching purpose. This paper analyzes data from the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive to understand what effect, if any, the federal law has had on the proportion of children adopted from foster care and on the time needed to complete those adoptions.
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Setting Capitated Rates for Child Welfare Programs

Fred Wulczyn, Eileen Sheu | 1997
Child welfare services currently operate in an environment characterized by increasing need for services and calls for cost containment and system reform. The authors of this paper suggest that capitated rates represent a potentially useful strategy for meeting those demands. This paper discusses issues related to setting a capitation rate and how to estimate the maximum rate of expenditure permissible for solvency under the proposed capitation rate.
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