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Initial child welfare screening decisions, traditionally made by an individual worker, determine if a family will receive further intervention by child protective services. A multi-disciplinary team (MDT) decision-making approach for child welfare referrals aims to provide a more thorough assessment of needs and strengths and to connect families to appropriate community-based providers. This study examined 159 child welfare referrals handled by MDTs compared to 331 referrals handled via the traditional screening approach. The study used a pseudo randomization procedure to assign referrals to the study conditions: Referrals logged on 2.5 days of the week were assigned to the treatment group; all others were assigned to the comparison group. Referrals handled by an MDT were more than four times as likely as those not handled by an MDT to be referred to community-based organizations (OR = 4.32, p < .001). There were no statistically significant differences in families' engagement with community-based organizations or child welfare outcomes. MDTs are a promising step in the initial process of connecting families to services, although they did not affect this study's longer-term outcomes.

Initial child welfare screening decisions, traditionally made by an individual worker, determine if a family will receive further intervention by child protective services. A multi-disciplinary team (MDT) decision-making approach for child welfare referrals aims to provide a more thorough assessment of needs and strengths and to connect families to appropriate community-based providers. This study examined 159 child welfare referrals handled by MDTs compared to 331 referrals handled via the traditional screening approach. The study used a pseudo randomization procedure to assign referrals to the study conditions: Referrals logged on 2.5 days of the week were assigned to the treatment group; all others were assigned to the comparison group. Referrals handled by an MDT were more than four times as likely as those not handled by an MDT to be referred to community-based organizations (OR = 4.32, p < .001). There were no statistically significant differences in families' engagement with community-based organizations or child welfare outcomes. MDTs are a promising step in the initial process of connecting families to services, although they did not affect this study's longer-term outcomes.

This article describes how a university and public child welfare agency partnership and a federal demonstration project trained MSW and PhD social welfare students in homelessness intervention research using a continuous quality improvement approach. Over a period of 5 years, the Cal-Child Welfare Leadership Training model between University of California, Berkeley's School of Social Welfare and San Francisco's Human Services Agency sought to train graduate students how to find, generate, and use evidence for child welfare decision making. Simultaneously and independently, the partnership designed and implemented a 5-year randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of permanent supportive housing for homeless families entering the child welfare system, called Families Moving Forward. We took advantage of the congruity of these two efforts by bringing student interns directly into the ongoing implementation and evaluation of Families Moving Forward, exposing them to implementation challenges that contextualize and moderate expectations about how a complex program for complex families should lead to improved outcomes. The aim was to endow students with the knowledge, skills, and discipline necessary to help make complex interventions work by fostering cross-system collaboration. We propose ways this teaching model can be scaled and installed elsewhere.

The federal government increasingly expects child welfare systems to be more responsive to the needs of their local populations, connect strategies to results, and use continuous quality improvement (CQI) to accomplish these goals. A method for improving decision making, CQI relies on an inflow of high-quality data, up-to-date research evidence, and a robust organizational structure and climate that supports the deliberate use of evidence for decision making. This article describes an effort to build and support these essential system components through one public-private child welfare agency-university partnership.

The federal government increasingly expects child welfare systems to be more responsive to the needs of their local populations, connect strategies to results, and use continuous quality improvement (CQI) to accomplish these goals. A method for improving decision making, CQI relies on an inflow of high-quality data, up-to-date research evidence, and a robust organizational structure and climate that supports the deliberate use of evidence for decision making. This article describes an effort to build and support these essential system components through one public-private child welfare agency-university partnership.

Increasingly, social work researchers are interested in examining how "place" and "location" contribute to social problems. Yet, often these researchers do not use the specialized spatial statistical techniques developed to handle the analytic issues faced when conducting ecological analyses. This article explains the importance of these techniques when analyzing spatial data, describes appropriate spatial statistical techniques, provides an illustration of how using inappropriate statistical techniques with spatial data can produce biased estimates of statistical tests, and discusses challenges to conducting spatial analysis. The study involved analyzing data for 941 census tracts for structural factors related to child maltreatment using traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and generalized linear squares (GLS) spatial regression. When using OLS, results showed that immigrant populations/child care burden was negatively related to rates of child maltreatment but not related when using GLS, which controls for correlations between these spatial units. Relying on OLS regression techniques to create interventions to reduce child maltreatment in spatial areas could result in developing ineffective strategies that fail to reduce maltreatment.

A cross section of children in the California foster care system was examined by comparing four different sibling classification schemes. The findings suggested that while the current sibling identification method is effective at capturing most sibling relationships, the addition of other search criteria offers a more comprehensive understanding of sibling placement activity.