California Child Welfare Indicators Project

The California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP) is a collaborative venture between the University of California at Berkeley and the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), with funding generously provided by the Department of Social Services and the Stuart Foundation. CCWIP provides a comprehensive source of child welfare administrative data, and serves as a model for open-data and information dissemination. Through a longstanding interagency data sharing agreement with CDSS, CCWIP receives quarterly extracts from California's child welfare administrative data system (CWS/CMS), configures the information longitudinally, and then produces performance outcomes reports that are made publicly available. CCWIP provides policymakers, child welfare workers, researchers, and the public with access to customizable information on California's entire child welfare system. Users can examine child welfare performance measures over time and across counties and demographic groups. In addition to stratifications by year and county, data can also be filtered by age, ethnicity, gender, placement type, and other subcategories to craft customized tabulations on topics of interest. Recently, CCWIP's research agenda has expanded through a collaboration with the Children's Data Network (CDN) at the University of Southern California and a series of linkages with other population?based data sources (e.g., birth records, death records). The integration of these additional data presents an exciting opportunity for expanded analyses. These include: comparisons of maltreated children with other children born in California who have not had child welfare contact, tracking early childbirth among the current population of foster children, and examining the relationship between reported child maltreatment and subsequent death. This work has already begun to answer important questions, and promises to enrich child welfare research in years to come.