May 2023Vol. 24, No. 4Roadmaps to Building Child Welfare Research Evidence
The series Roadmaps for Building Child Welfare Evidence explores strategies for building child welfare professionals' ability to build, understand, and use research and data evidence to increase the number of evidence-based practices. The Child Welfare Evidence Strengthening Team developed the series through a grant awarded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, which is part of the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The series is a collection of instructional resources child welfare administrators and evaluators can use to help them conduct child welfare evaluations. The resources address the following:
- Designing child welfare impact evaluations
- Writing high-quality evaluation reports
- Conducting a randomized controlled trial in child welfare
- Generating rigorous evidence with quasi-experimental designs
- Using administrative data to understand populations and measure outcomes
- Developing a theory of change and logic model for kinship navigator programs
- Evaluating capacity for a successful impact evaluation
The series emphasizes the importance of using evidence-based practices to improve outcomes for children and families involved in the child welfare system. Child welfare administrators and evaluators can use these resources to better understand how well programs, policies, or initiatives work for children, youth, and families.