Fathers and Continuous Learning in Child Welfare: Descriptive Evaluation Design Report

This design report describes our approach to the FCL descriptive study. The study has three aims. The first is to describe potentially promising strategies and approaches for engaging fathers and paternal relatives in the child welfare system. The second is to assess the promise of the BSC as a continuous quality improvement (CQI) framework for addressing challenges in the child welfare system—for example, whether and to what extent the BSC has potential for use in the child welfare field, and if so, how it may be applied to other child welfare challenges. The third is to assess the extent to which child welfare agencies experienced a shift in organizational culture after implementing the BSC. The FCL descriptive study is not intended to draw causal or other statistical inferences about the effectiveness of the BSC or any of the strategies that agencies developed and tested in the BSC. Instead, we will seek to describe promising practices and potential next steps for continued research.