Printer Friendly Page 
The Center for State Foster Care and Adoption Data
One of the main benefits of joining the center is access to the Center’s unique longitudinal database. This database gives state administrators a powerful new capacity to:
- Analyze key child welfare outcomes: time to reunification, time to adoption, placement stability, and re-entry to care
- Compare outcomes for different administrative offices within their state or with other states
- Trace outcomes from the aggregate to the individual child level
- Project future service patterns based on historical trends
- Test the impact of service and policy innovations
- Set performance goals and monitor progress
- Link financial decision-making to outcome measures
- Tell their story to media and make their case to legislators.
Membership also allows state administrators to work with other state MEMBERS in a unique national community to:
- Enhance the database model to maximize the above capacities and to track other child welfare outcomes while minimizing additional IT development costs.
- Participate in a forum in which states can work together to recognize and analyze national patterns and trends in a timely manner.
- Determine and guide a research agenda that will benefit not only individual states, the field of public child welfare in general.
The Center’s annual MEMBERSHIP fee is $25,000. The fee includes:
- Two powerful data tools that can be used to establish and maintain an accurate and sophisticated understanding of agency performance in your own states and across states:
- A sophisticated database for your state to analyze child welfare outcomes and performance.
- Access to your state’s longitudinal database as well as multi-state longitudinal database through a robust end-user web tool. Through the web tool, ability to analyze aggregate outcomes and individual level records. The web tool’s software is user friendly and facilitates the use of information with help screens.
- Five hours of technical assistance and training to agency staff on how to install and use the database and software to better understand system performance.
- Biannual updates of your state longitudinal database.
A variety of optional technical assistance opportunities will be available through the Center. This technical assistance will include the strategic use of data for program evaluation, budgeting, policy analysis, and compliance reporting. In addition, APHSA can provide technical assistance to state data center members through facilitation and coordination of the User’s Groups and as liaison to Chapin Hall to filter questions and provide Tier 1 analysis support.
Through the end-user web tool, you have access to the Foster Care Data Archive application, a web-based decision-support system that lets you query your state’s data. You structure your queries by making simple selections that do not require programming experience. Output from these queries can be viewed on-line or may be printed and saved to a file. The output is self-documenting, that is, the parameters you specified (dates, demographics, etc.) are listed on the output so that you will know later which data you are looking at.
You can opt to see a summary report of the data or you can look at the records that underlie the data. Getting case-specific data can be especially helpful if you’ve identified groups of cases that need special attention or follow-up.
You may also request the option to download the records that meet your query specifications. That data is downloaded into a file that you can import into a spreadsheet or into a data analysis package for further analysis or for linking with other data of interest.
The web tool is easy to use, and it is simple to get data out of it. However, the ease of use of the application belies the power of the tool. While it is simple to get data out, it requires careful thought and a willingness to be very systematic in order to get the right data to answer the question of interest that you have. Technical assistance is available, and a users’ group is being formed to cross-pollinate thinking across jurisdictions. Questions related to policies, programs, planning and linking outcomes to costs have all been posed and answered using Center data.
Some IT staff within jurisdictions resists joining the CSFCAD, believing they can provide the same functionality. While this may be technically feasible, there are very few states or counties whose staff have been able to invest the time and effort to build and maintain this kind of application. The unique structure of the data files result from careful programming, based on many years of development work by Chapin Hall. So, while many IT departments may well be able to produce this kind of data, rarely can it be done for such a low cost. In addition, locally developed applications, while useful in-jurisdiction, have little comparability to other States. The ability to talk readily with an analyst or a program person in another state about what they’ve done can save time and sharpen your in-house analysis.
Membership in the Center can also help a state with its CFSR. Several of the current CFSR measures do not reflect best practices in using longitudinal data and may reflect changes in outcomes that did not actually occur during your state’s PIP period. Reports from your state’s longitudinal database could help officials in your state more accurately describe your state’s performance. In addition, recent federal regulations reflect the Children’s Bureau’s intention to change the AFCARS submission to one that is longitudinal. Membership in the CSFCAD will give you a head start on preparing for this change in the way the federal government will be tracking and measuring outcomes.