In 2004, Chapin Hall and the American Public Human Services Association established the Center for State Foster Care and Adoption Data (State Data Center). Its mission is to support child welfare agencies in using longitudinal data and cutting-edge information technology to improve outcomes for children by monitoring their foster programs more effectively and evaluating how their investments are achieving desired results.

Today the State Data Center includes member child welfare agencies from Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington.

Member agencies provide their foster care and adoption administrative records to Chapin Hall for inclusion in a multistate data repository. Chapin Hall then organizes these data into a robust and flexible longitudinal database. A user-friendly webtool developed by Chapin Hall allows administrators to access data and generate a variety of individual or aggregated reports. Member agencies also receive technical assistance and training in using the database.

By working together to analyze national trends, State Data Center members help to guide Chapin Hall’s research agenda, which benefits individual states as well as the field of child welfare. Members also become part of a professional community of child welfare administrators who share best practices with peers and expert researchers in the field.

The State Data Center is guided by an advisory group of state child welfare leaders and representatives from the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Center for Social Services Research of the University of California at Berkeley, and other research universities. The State Data Center is supported through fees paid by member states and funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Casey Family Programs.

The founder and director of the Center for State Foster Care and Adoption Data is Chapin Hall Research Fellow, Fred Wulczyn. For additional information on State Data Center membership, contact Rosemary Gill at rgill@chapinhall.org.