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About the Measures
The study is collecting child- and family-level data from children in the child welfare system, their biological parents, caregivers, teachers, and caseworkers, as well as from administrative records. Face-to-face interviews or assessments will be conducted at baseline and at the 18-month follow-up with children, parents and non-parent caregivers; telephone interviews will be used to collect interim services data. Data on school engagement and performance will be obtained through questionnaires sent to teachers. Agency and system-level data will be collected from caseworkers, agency administrators, and the States.
During the first months of the study, an instrument design team with members from the child welfare research and policy communities determined the data to be collected and how to measure child and family functioning and well-being, service needs and utilization, and agency- and system-level factors that are likely to be related to child and family outcomes. Child outcomes of interest include health and physical well-being, cognitive and school performance, mental health, behavior problems, and social functioning and relationships. In selecting measures, the team considered how outcomes are related to policy decisions and included measures of mediating or moderating variables that are most likely to influence outcomes. Measures take into account participating children's varying developmental levels and cultural and linguistic diversity. Additionally, the measures have been selected to maximize the continuity of measurement over the study period and beyond, to be appropriate for use by lay interviewers in large-scale surveys and, where possible, to allow comparison with findings from other relevant large-scale surveys.
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