Using administrative data to reward agency performance: the case of the federal adoption incentive program

This article explores the history of the federal Adoption Incentive Program, the first federal child welfare outcome-based incentive program to rely solely on administrative data, and discusses it within the context of other prior and ongoing federal child welfare incentive programs. Various data-related issues are also examined, including the use of data to project program utilization and costs, set baselines for the number of adoptions, and award funds. Challenges in the legislatively required use of AFCARS data for determining the amount of incentive funds awarded and the impact of the program on AFCARS reporting are also discussed. The article concludes with a look at the impact of the Adoption Incentive Program on adoption and predictions for the future.     

Use of data to assess performance and promote outcome achievement by public and private child welfare agency staff

Despite the emphasis on evidence-based practice in the literature, little is known about the extent to which child welfare workers routinely use data to assess the effectiveness of their practice, or consider an array of evidence informed practices such as peer record review, supervisory sessions or program evaluation as useful in improving their performance. This study, conducted as a part of the planning phase for a larger research and demonstration project measured frontline staff perceptions in both the public and private sectors in one state regarding these and other outcome-focused activities. Statistically significant differences were noted between public and private agency staff. In addition, the relationship between staff's use of data and their assessment of their own skill and the support provided by their agency for an array of out-of-home care practice activities are described. Implications for building the use of evidence-informed practice in child welfare are discussed.     

Defining welfare spells. Coping with problems of survey responses and administrative data

The authors explore how to define a welfare spell and how well surveys measure welfare spells. By comparing survey and administrative data from the Work Pays Demonstration Project in California on the receipt of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), they find that a substantial amount of administrative churning occurs in administrative data. Through a mixing model of several break lengths, the authors find that a single definition of a break in welfare is not applicable to all respondents. Additionally, it appears that there is substantial variation in the break lengths respondents utilize. Finally, the authors show that the complexity of defining an accurate break in spells creates difficulties for detecting biases in survey responses.     

Using agency data for evidence-based programming: a university-agency collaboration

Agencies providing residential treatment are encouraged, or even mandated, to collect outcomes data and to implement evidence based practices, yet little guidance has been provided on how to do so using agency administrative data that are collected on an ongoing basis. We examined data on Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) scores for 1608 admissions to a residential treatment center from 2002 through 2008. CAFAS scores were measured every 90 days, providing multiple CAFAS scores for each individual. Results demonstrated that on average residents improved in functioning over time. Sensitive to the evolving needs of residents who had been entering the program, the treatment center made significant program changes in 2006 to attempt to better serve residents through a broad array of specialized programming. Compared to the overall results, the analysis suggested that residents who entered the program since October 2006 appeared to have made larger improvements in their CAFAS scores. Results were derived by employing multilevel models appropriate for estimating growth trajectories with repeated measures data. Conversations with agency staff suggested that using administrative data, and advanced statistical models, were extremely helpful for organizational decision making and evidence-based programming.     

Using administrative data to assess child safety in out-of-home care

This article describes efforts to produce useful safety measures from administrative data. A measure similar to that proposed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is presented and compared to a measure that takes into account the length of time children are in placement. These measures are also reported for out-of-home care placement types. The challenges posed in constructing such measures from extant data are discussed.     

Harnessing the potential of administrative data to inform child welfare programming with dynamic visualization methodologies

The majority U.S. states maintain administrative databases to collect information on the entry, movement, and exits of youth in the foster care system, yet the power of these data to inform continuous improvement efforts remains largely untapped. This underutilization ignores the vast potential inherent in longitudinal child welfare data to better understand the trajectories of youth in care and the effectiveness of the services they receive. To help promote the use of administrative data to inform child welfare programming, this paper provides an overview and demonstration of a Feedback Improvement System with web-based visualization technology to illustrate child- and agency-level child welfare data from the state of Utah. The procedures and system design elements used to obtain, process, and display the feedback data are detailed. Recommendations for designing and implementing web-based feedback systems for child welfare agencies are provided.     

Safety, permanency, and in-home services: applying administrative data

This article describes the construction and use of safety and permanency indicators, two aspects of a full set of indicators that also includes child well-being and family functioning. The indicators were constructed from Philadelphia's Family and Child Tracking System and were used to examine the city's Services to Children in their Own Home (SCOH) program. Cohort datasets were constructed through the use of extract files, and two independent data file construction algorithms were employed to calibrate the accuracy of the data construction process. The primary unit of analysis was the "family" spell in SCOH services. Contextual variables included family structure, race, and service intensity. The indicators associated with SCOH spells included reports of maltreatment after service, founded maltreatment after service, and out-of-home placement after service. Event history techniques were used to conduct the data analysis. Baseline indicator data for Philadelphia are presented, and future uses for such data are discussed.     

Measuring inequality of opportunity with imperfect data: the case of Turkey

The measurement of inequality of opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data problems in countries where a demographic and health survey (DHS) and an ancillary household expenditure survey are available. One method relies only on the DHS, and constructs a wealth index as a measure of economic advantage. The alternative method imputes consumption from the ancillary survey into the DHS. In both cases, we compute a lower bound estimator of the share of (ex-ante) inequality of opportunity in total inequality. Parametric and non-parametric estimates are calculated for each method, and the parametric approach is shown to yield preferable lower-bound measures. In an application to the sample of ever-married women aged 30–49 in Turkey, inequality of opportunity accounts for at least 26% (31%) of overall inequality in imputed consumption (the wealth index).     

Measuring interference with employment and education reported by women with abusive partners: preliminary data

This study examines the reliability and convergent validity of the Work/School Abuse Scale (W/SAS), a measure of the ways that abusive men interfere with women's participation in education and employment. Results indicate good reliability as measured by coefficient alpha and significant correlations with both a revised version of the Conflict Tactics Scale and the Psychological Abuse Index. The W/SAS is a useful measure of the ways in which physical force and other means of interfering with women's lives isolate them from activities that might provide income, social contacts, and a sense of accomplishment. It may also be used to examine whether changes in welfare policies affect levels of physical force and nonviolent interference in women's employment and education, as suggested by the Family Violence Option to the 1996 revisions in federal welfare policies.     

Recognising the agency of people with dementia

People with dementia have been assumed to possess weak or even no agency, so this paper provides a novel contribution to academic debate by examining their actual potential for agency. The author draws on findings from a qualitative study of everyday decision-making by people with dementia that aimed to identify the role of social factors (such as gender) in influencing their involvement in decisions. Whilst decision-making constitutes a form of deliberative agency, the research also identified when agency was alternatively habituated, embodied or emotional. The Economic and Social Research Council-funded research was undertaken in the North of England. Existing theoretical perspectives on agency are critiqued, particularly in relation to rationality, language and individualised agency. The study highlighted that people with dementia who lack deliberative capacity can nonetheless demonstrate creative capacity for agency. A more expansive concept of agency is needed in social science theory that is informed by the experiences of cognitively disabled people.     

Private child welfare agency managers' perceptions of the effectiveness of different performance management strategies

In all states, public and private child welfare agencies partner in an effort to deliver effective and accountable services to children and families (Collins-Camargo, Ensign, & Flaherty, 2008). While anecdotal information suggests that managers in competitive markets have incentives to carefully select and implement performance management strategies (McBeath, Briggs, & Aisenberg, 2009; Smith, 2010), little is known about the effectiveness of these strategies. This paper explores managerial perceptions regarding the usefulness of three techniques for performance management: supervisory review within the human resources model; priority review within internal processes; and outcomes management within the rational goal model. Managerial perceptions of the effectiveness of these efforts are examined in relation to organizational characteristics, capacity, and interagency competition.     

Measuring corporate social performance: The problem of values

Debates over the social performance of corporations have carried with them implicit evaluations of that performance. The apparent subjectivity and bias of these informal evaluations has led to the development of more formalized corporate social performance assessment methodologies — social audits. In this paper it is argued that these social audits are also influenced by subjectivity and bias considerations; and thru the case study of a social audit of a corporate safety program, the underlying value issues at the core of these influences are explored. The value implications of the various social audit methodologies in use are discussed; and several value sensitive stages/elements of social audit research and evaluation research in general are identified. Recommendations set forth for minimizing the negative consequences of value-influenced evaluations are a value-explicit evaluation approach, greater standardization of evaluation procedures, a dialectic evaluation approach, and better informed evaluation consumers.     

Electoral turnout of foreign-born residents in Chile: an analysis with data from the administrative census and opinion polls

Based on an administrative census of the 267,116 migrants registered for the 2017 presidential elections and a survey applied to 4771 migrants, we conclude that (1) the electoral participation of migrants shows a significant gender gap, with women participating in a higher proportion; (2) migrants who registered earlier in the electoral registers, are more likely to vote compared to the rest; (3) when migrants come from countries that implement compulsory voting, they increase their likelihood of voting in the receiving country; (4) the declaration of wanting to remain in Chile and not return to their countries of origin or migrate to another country increases the probability of voting, and the same happens with married migrants, with Chilean children, with a Chilean partner, and with a better economic situation; (5) social capital has a positive influence on electoral participation.     

New approaches to the estimation of migration flows from census and administrative data sources

Census data represent an important source of information about migration flows. However, existing estimation procedures based on intercensal projection are often inconvenient to apply and are sensitive to even quite small changes in enumeration completeness. 2 new estimation procedures applicable to data from 2 censuses are developed and illustrated using US data. The 1st method is essentially a modification of traditional intercensal projection techniques, but as a result of working with age groups rather than cohorts, it is simpler to apply and allows mortality of the migrants to be incorporated over the intercensal period. The 2nd method also uses information from 2 censuses, but also uses independent information on the age pattern of migration from administrative sources or from other census questions. The method uses the fact that the age pattern of recent migration is likely to be different from the age distribution of the overall population to distinguish between intercensal change due to migration and apparent intercensal change due to changes in enumeration completeness. If the method's assumptions are met, it is possible to estimate the relative coverage of the 2 censuses as well as the scale of the independent age pattern of migration relative to the coverage of 1 or other of the censuses. The illustrative applications of the methods to US data suggest that both can work reasonably well.     

The heterogeneous effects of COVID-19 on labor market flows: evidence from administrative data

The Journal of Economic Inequality - We investigate the short-term effects of COVID-19 on labor market flows and how they are mediated by labor market policy. Using Italian administrative data on a...     

Measuring the determinants of relative economic performance of rural areas

This paper examines the determinants of economic performance of 149 English rural Local Authority Districts (LADs). A Three Stage Least Square (3SLS) estimation procedure was employed to jointly determine the influence of a wide range of indicators representing economic, human, cultural and environmental capital, as well as less tangible or ‘soft’ factors on three distinct components of economic performance: productivity, employment and labor market participation. The results reveal that a range of facets of economic and human capital, including the three key drivers of productivity (skills, investment and enterprise), spatial factors (peripherality and accessibility), and other key factors (economic structure, government infrastructure, road infrastructure, and occupational health), are significant determinants of economic performance in rural areas. This study is of value since it proposes a method for modelling the determinants of economic performance which is transferable to other environments in the UK and beyond. In addition, it proposes a set of benchmarks of economic performance using readily available data, and highlights some implications for rural policy and several avenues for future research.     

Change agency as performance and embeddedness: Exploring the possibilities and limits of Butler and Bourdieu

In this paper, we explore the dual role of human agency in maintaining the status quo and generating change. Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu offer differing conceptions of change agency in relation to organization and transformation of gender relations. Focusing on how those approaches would work, we analyse an empirical case study on a particular change process: getting women the right to vote in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell. We contribute to the current use of Butler's and Bourdieu's theories in organization studies in three main ways. First, we explore stability and change from the lenses of these two scholars. Second, we illustrate how change agency looks from these two distinct perspectives. Finally, we offer an empirical analysis that identifies the main elements of change agency in the two frameworks and discuss the possibilities and limitations of bringing these two approaches together to better understand change agency.     

Data-based organizational change: the use of administrative data to improve child welfare programs and policy

Administrative databases hold the potential to have a significant impact on the development of effective child welfare programs and policies. This article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of administrative databases, issues with their implementation and data analysis, and effective presentation of their data at different levels in child welfare organizations.