Safety, permanency, and in-home services: applying administrative data

Area of Science:

• Child Welfare Research
• Social Work Practice
• Public Health Indicators

Background:

• Child welfare systems aim to ensure child safety and permanency.
• Effective programs require robust indicators to measure outcomes.
• Assessing services for children in their own homes (SCOH) is crucial for family stability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To construct and utilize safety and permanency indicators.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of Philadelphia's Services to Children in their Own Home (SCOH) program.
• To establish a data-driven approach for child welfare program assessment.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Philadelphia's Family and Child Tracking System data.
• Constructed cohort datasets and employed data file construction algorithms for accuracy.
• Analyzed data using event history techniques with family spells as the unit of analysis.

Main Results:

• Developed indicators including post-service maltreatment reports, founded maltreatment, and out-of-home placements.
• Presented baseline indicator data for Philadelphia's SCOH program.
• Identified key contextual variables such as family structure, race, and service intensity.

Conclusions:

• Safety and permanency indicators are valuable tools for child welfare program evaluation.
• The developed indicators provide insights into the outcomes of SCOH services.
• Future research should leverage these indicators for ongoing program monitoring and improvement.