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Project Details
CalWORKs/Child Welfare Partnership Project Evaluation
(Funded by the Stuart Foundation, through the California Center for Research on Women and Families)
Staff: Jill Duerr Berrick
The CalWORKs/Child Welfare Partnership Project is an initiative to facilitate greater coordination between public welfare and child welfare agencies in California, in the context of changes brought by federal and state welfare reforms. This study will evaluate the impact of the Partnerships efforts on the change process in participating counties.
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Child Welfare Reform in California: Implementation, Outcomes, and Experiences
(Funded by the California Endowment, the Packard Foundation, and the Stuart Foundation)
Staff: Jill Duerr Berrick, Principal Investigator
This multi-year project examines the implementation of concurrent planning and reunification bypass in California counties, and the outcomes and experiences of children and families served under these policies.
Downloads:
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Geographic Information System (GIS) Archive Project
(funded by Stuart Foundation)
Staff: Barbara Needell, Principal Investigator
Adds mapping capability to the California Children's Services Archive.
Click on the link below to visit this website: CWS/CMS Maps
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KinGap (Kinship Guardianship Assistance Payment) Program Implementation
Staff: Aron Shlonsky and Jill Duerr Berrick
In January, 2000 the KinGAP program became available to kinship caregivers in California. KinGAP is available to relatives who take legal guardianship of a child in Californias foster care system and then exit the child welfare system while maintaining a subsidy equal to the basic foster care board rate. A series of three briefshave been developed which document the trends in implementing KinGAP in California, the benefits afforded to children, and the potential for expanding the program in counties currently underutilizing the program.
The Implementation of California's Kin-GAP Program - Downloads:
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California Family to Family Implementation
(funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation)
Staff: Barbara Needell, Principal Investigator
Provides technical assistance for foster care reform, particularly in the area of self-evaluation. (see the Annie E. Casey Foundation Family to Family Initiative at: http://www.aecf.org/familytofamily/).
Click on the link below to visit this website:
CWS/CMS Reports
Team
Decision Making Materials:
TDM Support Page
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Performance Indicators for Child Welfare Services in California/California Children's Services Archive
(funded by the California Department of Social Services and the Stuart Foundation)
Staff: Barbara Needell, Principal Investigator
Ongoing analysis and reporting using statewide and county-specific child welfare administrative data, along with data from other sources. Under an Interagency Agreement with the CDSS, we receive quarterly extracts from the Child Welfare Services Case Management System (CWS/CMS). With CDSS funding and additional support from the Stuart Foundation, the Performance Indicators Project creates and presents timely and useful data about children who are involved in our Child Welfare System.
Click on the link below to visit this website:
CWS/CMS Reports
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"Dude, Where's My Data?" (aka The DataDude): CWS/CMS Web Reports Data Tool
Developer: William C. Dawson, Associate Research Specialist
The UCB DataDude facilitates access to the information available in the CWS/CMS reports section of the Center for Social Services Research (CSSR) website. In particular, this tool (in Microsoft Excel) allows users to review and summarize data across time periods for measures of interest.
The UCB DataDude is freely available for the use of California counties and others who wish to download data from the CWS/CMS reports on the Center for Social Services Research website.
Click on the links below to download the DataDude tool in MS Excel or associated documentation:
- DataDude Tool* v.0.6.7 for MS Excel 2000 or later (250 KB)
- PowerPoint (with notes): The DataDude: A Simple Program to Simplify Your Life (1.27 MB)
- DataDude Tool User Guide (Word Doc 2.96 MB)
- DataDude Tool User Guide (PDF 1.63 MB)
- DataDude Tool Quick Reference (Word Doc 1.04 MB)
- DataDude Tool Quick Reference (PDF 127 KB)
*Download Tip: To use the DataDude Tool, make sure that you download the tool to your computer first, by right-clicking on the link and then clicking on the "Save Target As" option.
If you need assistance or have suggestions, please contact DataDudeHelp.
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An Evaluation of California's Title IV-E Child Welfare Waiver Demonstration
Staff: Edward Cohen, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
The demonstration allowed the state to waive limits on the use of foster care funds to test innovative methods of providing child welfare services. The interventions that were tested included Wraparound Services, Family Group Decision-Making (FGDM), and other Intensive Services designed to prevent initial placement, provide more permanent, and/or stabilize current placements for children involved with the child welfare system. Earlier components of the study also included Extended Voluntary Placement, Community Mentoring, and Shared Family Care.
Members of the 2003-04 team were:
Greg Rose, M.S.W., Chief Resources and Training Development, CDSS
Cheryl Treadwell, Manager, Integrated Services Unit, CDSS
Lynn Purcell, Administrative Support (UCB)
Esperanza Hernandez, M.S.W. Social Services Consultant, Integrated Services Unit, CDSS
Janet Garland, M.S.W. Social Services Consultant, Integrated Services Unit, CDSS
Wraparound Study:
Charlie Ferguson, Ph.D., Coordinator of Wraparound Study
Yasmin Firoozabady, Undergraduate Student Researcher and Administrative Support
Joanna Langs, M.S.W. Graduate Student Researcher
FGDM Study:
Karen Thomas, M.S.W., Coordinator of FGDM Study
Brenda Lorentzen, M.S.W. Doctoral Student Researcher (Fresno Cost Study)
Stephanie Berzin, M.S.W. Doctoral Student Researcher
Jennifer Delmhorst, M.S.W., Doctoral Student Researcher
Michael Courville, M.S.W. Graduate Student Researcher and Intern 2002-03 (Case and Conference Plan Analyses)
Information Technology
William Dawson, M.S.W., Technical Lead
Michael Arnold, M.S.W., Doctoral Student Researcher
In addition, many thanks to previous years' researchers, our interviewers in the field, the staffs of Alameda, Fresno, Humboldt, Los Angeles, Riverside, Sacramento and San Luis Obispo Counties, and provider partners, who all worked very hard to participate in this complicated study.
Click on the link(s) below to download pdfs (hard copies not available for these reports):
Selected Waiver Progress and Process Reports and Final Report
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CalWORKs and Child Welfare: Case Management for Public Child Welfare Workers
(ended 2001)
Staff: Laura Frame, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate, Jill Duerr Berrick, Ph.D., Christina Sogar, M.A., Stephanie Cosner Berzin, M.S.W., Jennifer Pearlman, M.A
This course curriculum is designed to educate social workers about the experiences and needs of families involved with both the public child welfare and child welfare services systems. The goal is to train workers to provide high quality case management services within a post-welfare reform environment. It is developed based on data from a longitudinal, ethnographic study of 10 families living in an urban environment.
Click on the link below to visit this website:
Downloads:
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The Impact of Welfare on Precarious Families
(ended 2001)
Staff: Laura Frame, Senior Research Associate
This study utilized survey and ethnographic data to examine the impact of welfare reform on some of the most socially and economically precarious of California's children and families.
Click on the link below to visit this website:
- Experiences of Living Through Welfare Reform in One California County (2001)
- Parent-Child Relationships in Conditions of Urban Poverty (2001)
- Precarious Families: Divergent Pathways of Adaptation to Poverty and Welfare Reform. A Policy Brief.(2001)
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Listening to Children in Foster Care
(ended 2000)
Staff: Fox, A., Frasch, K., & Berrick, J.D.
This curriculum is designed to improve the quality of care provided to children in out-of-home care. More specifically, it highlights the importance of providing child welfare services that are more responsive to the voices of children in kin and non-kin foster care. As a teaching tool, the curriculum is intended for two primary audiences: students in graduate schools of social work/welfare and child welfare workers. Since these audiences may have different needs, the materials are designed to be sufficiently flexible for both purposes. Depending upon the audience and the training time available, child welfare faculty and agency trainers may use the curriculum in its entirety or in part. While most of the findings reported in this curriculum were generated from research conducted in California, all of the curriculum's sections have a high level of applicability to child welfare practice in other states.
Click on the link below to visit this website:
Curriculum: Listening to Children in Foster Care (2000)
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Local Agency Survey (LAS) of the National Survey on Child and Adolescent Well Being (NSCAW)
(ended 2000)
Staff: Jill Duerr Berrick, Principal Investigator; Lorelei Mitchell, Research Associate
Under a sub-contract to the Research Triangle Institute, U.C. Berkeley participated in a study known as the "Local Agency Survey". The study includes a sample of 7,000 children and their families involved in the child welfare system. Relatively little is known about the implementation of recent federal child welfare reforms, nor the emerging service delivery models that they generate. The "Local Agency Survey" (LAS) of the National Survey on Child and Adolescent Well Being (NSCAW), administered in 1999-2000, provides a contemporary picture of child welfare administrators' perceptions of and experiences with the implementation of ASFA, MEPA-IEP, and TANF. NSCAW is a multi-year research study funded by the Children's Bureau of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, United States Department of Health and Human Services. NSCAW will provide the first information collected from a national probability sample of public child welfare agencies, and is primarily intended to yield information regarding the characteristics, needs, experiences and outcomes for children and families investigated by child welfare agencies following a report of abuse and neglect. As part of this effort, however, information has also been collected (using the LAS) from child welfare administrators regarding the characteristics of their agencies, policy environments, and experiences implementing relevant child welfare policy. This paper reports the findings most relevant to understanding the effects to date of ASFA, MEPA-IEP and TANF on child welfare service delivery in the United States.
Click on the link below to visit this website:
NSCAW Local Agency Survey (2000)
(note: you will be downloading from a website outside of CSSR. Hard copies of this report are not available through CSSR.)
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The Impact of Welfare Reform on Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
(ended 1999)
Staff: Meredith Minkler, Dr.P.H., Principal Investigator Jill Duerr Berrick, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigator , Barbara Needell, Ph.D., Senior Research Analyst
This report reviews the federal welfare reform legislation, and the subsequent development and implementation of California's welfare reform legislation, CalWORKS (California Work Opportunities and Responsibilities to Kids), with particular attention to their relevance for California's grandparents raising grandchildren.
Click on the link below to visit this website:
The Impact of Welfare Reform on Grandparents Raising Grandchildren (1999)
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California Children's Services Archive Infrastructure Support
(funded by the Stuart Foundation)
Staff: Barbara Needell, Principal Investigator
Additional funding for Archive maintenance and dissemination of findings.
Click on the link below to visit this website:
CWS/CMS Reports
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Evaluation of Contra Costa County's "Partnering for Permanence" Project
Staff: Edward Cohen, Jill Duerr Berrick, Co-Investigators
Sarah Taylor (Doctoral Student Researcher), Elizabeth Wilder (Gradute Student Researcher)
Contra Costa County Evaluation Staff: Gloria Halverson and Patrick Harrington
“Partnering for Permanence” (P4P) is a five-year initiative funded by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, in an effort to “improve child welfare outcomes through systems of care.” The purpose of the grant is to plan and develop infrastructure within public child welfare agencies and among community partners and stakeholders for the purpose of improving services and outcomes for targeted child welfare populations. Contra Costa County’s Employment and Human Services Department, which administers the county’s child welfare services, is one of nine grantees nationwide. UC Berkeley's external evaluation consists of the following components: 1) A survey of emancipating foster youth for one year, with three waves of surveys focused on their use of Independent Living Skills Services, and status in domains of educational attainment, stable housing, health/mental health, finances, among other areas; 2) tracking the fidelity and client satisfaction of a new Parent Partner program, using former child welfare service recipients as paid parent mentors for new birth parents.
The toll free number for our researchers is 877-263-9012
For a copy of the youth survey instrument, click here. To view our Informed Consent forms, click here.
For a copy of the Parent Partner Fidelity and Satisfaction Survey instrument, click here: English version Spanish version
New--Click here for the Parent Focus Group Informed Consent forms
New--Click here for the Professional Interviews (Parent Partner Program) Informed Consent forms
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