How Child Welfare Agency Management Affects Children's Outcomes

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This K01 award will enable an organizational scholar to examine how child welfare agency management affects service processes and children's outcomes. Dr. Rebecca Wells has examined intra- and inter- organizational dynamics within the health care safety net. With K01 funding, she will work closely with Dr. E. Michael Foster, a children's mental health services researcher, and Dr. Mark Courtney, a leading scholar in human services for vulnerable children. Drs. Foster and Courtney as well as other methodological and content experts will assist Dr. Wells in 3 studies of how child welfare agency internal management and relationships with other agencies affect the ways caseworkers serve families, the comprehensiveness of services received, and children's mental health and other outcomes over time. Based on a multilevel conceptual model of child welfare services, 3 major questions motivate this proposal: (1) Do child welfare agency management emphases on measurement and accountability, human resources, change management, and ties to other agencies affect children's outcomes? (2) Does case management or service comprehensiveness mediate associations between agency management and children's outcomes? (3) Does service availability moderate associations between ties to other agencies and outcomes? Study 1 will use data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being. Study 2 will be a comparative case study that explores questions from study 1 and develop surveys for study 3. Study 3 will entail analyzing primary survey data and previously collected outcomes data from at-risk children. Findings from these 3 studies will enable Dr. Wells to develop the multilevel modeling, qualitative, and survey design competencies as well as substantive familiarity with child welfare and mental health services necessary to develop realistic models of how management decisions affect children's outcomes. Training for this research involves a variety of courses and systematic consultation with Drs. Foster and Courtney as well as other national experts on advanced empirical methods, children's health, and child welfare and mental health services, including the responsible conduct of research involving human subjects. The proposed research will improve public health by indicating how some aspects of child welfare agency management affect children's outcomes. Subsequent research will examine how child welfare and mental health agencies collectively affect children.