Understanding and measuring child welfare outcomes.

Editorial: Commentary on Disproportionality in Child Welfare Terry L. Cross PART I - UNDERSTANDING AND MEASURING RACIAL DISPROPORTIONALITY AND DISPARITY OF OUTCOMES Measuring Racial Disparity in Child Welfare

Understanding and addressing racial/ethnic disproportionality in the front end of the child welfare system.

Racial/ethnic disproportionality in the child welfare system is a complicated social problem that is receiving increasing amounts of attention from researchers and practitioners. This review of the literature examines disproportionality in the front-end of the child welfare system and interventions that may address it. While none of the interventions had evidence suggesting that they reduced di...

Assessing child and youth well-being: implications for child welfare practice.

The measurement of child well-being has become increasingly important in child welfare practice in the past ten years with the federal emphasis on measuring positive outcomes for children and families. Practical and methodological barriers to evaluating well-being exist alongside positive developments in the field. This article reviews the research literature related to child and youth well-bei...

Understanding communities today: using matching needs and services to assess community needs and design community-based services.

Matching Needs and Services (MNS) is a practice tool intended to help people who work with vulnerable children use rigorously assembled information on needs as a guide to design, implement, and evaluate more-effective services. To do this, MNS focuses on needs but links them to outcomes and thresholds before dealing with the services to achieve those outcomes.

Substance-abusing child welfare parents: treatment and child placement outcomes.

The authors present findings from their study of 167 child welfare parents referred for substance abuse assessments. Relationships between gender, prior treatment, court-ordered intervention, significant others' support, and treatment and placement outcomes are examined. Findings indicate significant others' support positively influences all outcomes while court-ordered intervention is not pred...