Child welfare administrators and evaluators conduct evaluations to understand how and how well programs, policies, and initiatives work for children, young people, and families. Data already collected in child welfare administrative data systems—administrative data—can serve as a resource for these evaluations. This report introduces administrative data and discusses two ways child welfare administrators and evaluators can use it: to understand the populations in the evaluation and measure outcomes to see improvements. The report also discusses how you can use administrative data to create evidence by measuring outcomes in an outcome or impact evaluation.

Key Findings and Highlights

The unique features of administrative data make it a valuable resource for evaluations.

• Administrative data usually contains data on the whole population and key child welfare outcomes across time in a standardized way.
• Collected as part of a child welfare agency’s routine tasks, administrative data also minimizes the need to collect primary data and reduces data collection burden.
• Administrative data has rich information about child- and family-level characteristics and each child’s maltreatment, assessment, and placement history. Because of this, administrative data gives you a powerful tool to understand your evaluation populations, which are an important foundation for a strong evaluation.
• Largely because of its ability to track data for the whole population, administrative data can be helpful when measuring outcomes, especially when you’re looking at key child welfare outcomes such as child safety, placement stability, or permanency.
• Linking to other data sources beyond your child welfare information system can expand the universe of outcomes you can track.

Recommendations

Making better decisions in child welfare requires evidence. One way to create evidence is through evaluations, which can answer questions about the implementation and effectiveness of a program or intervention. Administrative data can provide the information needed to help answer many of these questions. We recommend you use administrative data in your evaluations, especially when understanding evaluation populations and tracking key child welfare outcomes such as child safety, placement stability, placement types, and permanency.

This resource is part of the Roadmaps to Building Evidence in Child Welfare series—a collection of instructional resources about conducting child welfare evaluations. You can find more practical guidance on data, evaluation, and evidence in the child welfare field from CWEST in materials from the Child Welfare Evidence Building Academy, a program of trainings for child welfare agency staff, practitioners, and evaluators.