Child Welfare Study to Enhance Equity with Data

The CW-SEED project aims to understand how and to what extent data are used to explore equity in service delivery and child and family outcomes, to identify barriers or problematic data practices, and to explore efforts by child welfare agencies and their partners to use data to reduce barriers across the continuum of child welfare services. The project will examine practices across the data life cycle related to data planning, collection, access, and analysis; use of statistical tools and algorithms; and data reporting and dissemination. Intentional, continuous engagement of community partners and advocates with lived child welfare experience, child welfare administrators and staff, policymakers, researchers, and data leaders will inform all aspects of the work.

The project team will conduct the following activities.

• Conduct an environmental scan and case studies in up to five sites to examine how data use among child welfare agencies and their partners can advance equity; 
• Produce a research agenda and propose design options that will provide a platform for building capacity among child welfare agencies and their partners; and 
• Produce a final report that summarizes findings on promising data practices from the environmental scan and the case studies.
  
  By understanding the data practices in the field—and the facilitators and barriers that exist at the system, organizational, and individual levels—the project will help ACF inform equity approaches, highlight remaining challenges in using data to advance equity, and document the remaining questions to be answered.