Call for Information: How do Child Welfare Agencies Collect and Use Data to Advance Equity?

Call for Information

Share information about how state and local child welfare agencies and their partners collect and use data to enhance equity among the populations they serve. We are interested in hearing from a diversity of individuals, including from state and local agency staff, administrators, researchers, practitioners, community partners, and people with lived experiences.

What are we interested in learning about?

Share documented successes, challenges, and possible barriers to using data to enhance equity in child welfare. This may include information from the following sources:

1. Research and other literature on promising or potentially problematic data practices (including published articles, reports, and white papers on data practices in child welfare or an adjacent field such as health or justice)
2. Other documents describing promising or potentially problematic data practices (such as policy or reporting documents from state and local agencies, and descriptions of community partners’ data practices)
3. Experiences and perspectives of state or local child welfare agencies or partners that are currently using or planning to implement promising data practices to understand and enhance equity or data practices that may exacerbate inequities
4. Related initiatives involving data practices to understand and improve equity

Why are we making this call?

Information will inform the Child Welfare Study to Enhance Equity with Data (CW-SEED) project. The 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. Information obtained may be included in public-facing products.

What do we mean by equity?

Consistent with President Biden’s Executive Order 13985 (Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government ), the CW-SEED working definition of equity is:

The consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.

What do we mean by data practices?

Data practices are the activities that take place throughout the data life cycle—planning, collection, access, analysis, use of statistical tools and algorithms, reporting, and dissemination—and involve all forms of information, including quantitative and qualitative data. Data practices may address the continuum of child welfare services from prevention through permanency or aging out.

Examples of data practices could include:

1. Engaging communities with firsthand experience in the child welfare system in the planning, collection, interpretation, or synthesis of data to understand service needs, delivery, and outcomes
2. Establishing administrative data linkages or data sharing across service systems
3. Identifying or measuring disparities in service delivery and outcomes
4. Using reliable, valid, and culturally appropriate measures
5. Applying innovative and rigorous analytic methods to understand people’s characteristics and service needs
6. Promoting transparency and ethical use of data for decision-making
7. Examining organizational and administrative policies that create, exacerbate, or improve systemic inequities

Submission instructions

Please send information to CWSEED@mathematica-mpr.com by March 31, 2022.