Introduction
The Supporting Evidence Building in Child Welfare Project, funded by the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation in partnership with the Children’s Bureau, conducts rigorous evaluations of interventions for the child welfare population. The project focuses on evaluating interventions that already have some evidence of effectiveness. The goal is to increase the number of interventions that are considered by the field to be supported or well-supported by the evidence. We invite child welfare agencies and others to nominate themselves and a program or service that they would like to be evaluated as part of this project.
At this time, we are particularly, although not exclusively, interested in evaluating programs or services in the following areas:
- mental health prevention and treatment services;
- substance abuse prevention and treatment services;
- in-home parent skill-based programs;
- kinship navigator programs; and
- programs for transition-age youth.
The project cannot fund the provision of services. Therefore, your program needs to have separate funding. We are looking for programs or services that you are currently operating or that you are planning to roll out in the near future.
We are seeking nominees who are willing to conduct a rigorous evaluation, which may involve randomly assigning clients to receive the intervention or to services as usual.
The project team will review all submissions and may contact you for further information. If your intervention is selected, the Urban Institute and their partners (Child Trends and Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago) will work with you to conduct two studies:
- An impact study to determine if the services provided lead to improved outcomes. This may involve the use of child welfare administrative data, interviews, and/or assessments with clients who are receiving the service and a comparison group of clients who are not getting the service.
- An implementation study to understand the client population, how the services are provided, service components, and other details. This may involve interviews with managers, staff, or clients, as well as program data collection.
We invite you to submit a brief description of the intervention, your name, and contact information to cwinterventions@acf.hhs.gov by December 20, 2019. If your program or service is considered for evaluation, the Urban Institute team will contact you.