There is limited research assessing the effectiveness of family engagement for improving permanency for children. An important challenge is that randomized designs are not feasible for evaluating these practices because effective implementation of family engagement requires systemic change. Findings from a national evaluation are presented to illustrate how preliminary evidence can be developed...

As the rate at which adults are being incarcerated in the United States escalates, child welfare professionals are encountering growing numbers of children who have parents in prison. Current estimates indicate that as many as 1.5 million children have an incarcerated parent; many thousands of others have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. These vulnerable c...

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...

This article introduces the reader to this special issue on Systems Change and highlights six lessons learned about theory, methods, and interventions for systems change that emerged across the included articles. The value of a systems approach to systems change is examined, including the need for frameworks, methods, and change activities that attend to the characteristics of systems.

In their recent work, Matsumura and Ogawa (2012) showed that in the context of a mixed duopoly, equilibrium social welfare is higher in price-setting competition than in quantity-setting competition. We found that when the strength of network effects is sufficiently high, the above result is totally reversed; thus, in a mixed duopoly, the presence of network effects weakens the superiority of p...