Using Child Welfare Administrative Data in the Permanency Innovations Initiative Evaluation

Administrative data provide a rich source of information for child welfare administrators and the child welfare research community. With administrative data, program managers, evaluators and others may examine who is served by the child welfare system, engage in continuous quality improvement efforts, and evaluate changes in service delivery outputs and outcomes over time. In addition, using administrative data to evaluate child welfare programs and practices can help inform program development, policy decisions, and program funding to improve the safety, permanency, and well-being of children involved in the child welfare system. This brief discusses the PII Evaluation Team’s (PII-ET) and PII Grantees’ use of administrative data in the PII evaluation. It begins by defining administrative data and providing information about the most commonly used child welfare administrative datasets, outlines several of the challenges associated with using administrative data, then highlights the ways in which administrative data are used in the PII evaluation. Permanency Innovations Initiative (PII) The federal Permanency Innovations Initiative (PII) is a multi-site demonstration project designed to improve permanency outcomes for children in foster care who face the most serious barriers to permanency. Child welfare policy and practice are limited by a lack of evidence-supported interventions. The PII project aims to address this lack by increasing the rate of children discharged to permanent homes and adding to the body of knowledge about what works in child welfare. In 2010, the Children’s Bureau, within the Administration for Children and Families funded six Grantees, a training and technical assistance provider (PII-TTAP), and an evaluation team (PIIET). Each Grantee is implementing a unique approach to the project, both in the populations they target and the interventions they develop or adapt. PII-ET is charged with designing and carrying out rigorous evaluations to examine the implementation and effectiveness of the interventions designed to reduce long-term foster care stays and improve child and family outcomes.