This webinar series offers technical assistance to child welfare agencies in the US on how to use data to improve outcomes for children and families.
The first webinar in this series discusses strategies for mining administrative data to assess the characteristics and needs of at-risk child welfare populations. Using examples from a federal Permanency Innovations Initiative (PII) grantee in Illinois, Dr. Dana Weiner identifies the key requirements of productive data mining, steps in the data mining process, and useful statistical techniques for analyzing and making sense of administrative data.
The second webinar discusses propensity score matching (PSM) as a methodologically rigorous alternative to randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Using examples of grantees funded through the federal Permanency Innovations Initiative (PII), Mr. Andrew Barclay discusses the theory underlying PSM, techniques for implementing PSM and validating the results, and caveats and limitations of this statistical technique.
The third webinar reviews strategies for using evaluation findings to help sustain program and evaluation activities following the end of federal funding. The sustainability planning and activities of two grantees funded through the federal Permanency Innovations Initiative (PII) – North Carolina Department of Social Services (funded in 2011 for five years) and Western Michigan University (funded in 2012 for five years) – are reviewed and discussed in detail.