The Child Welfare Qualitative Data Mining Project, aimed at developing more effective strategies for research utilizing narrative data in child welfare case records, builds on previous work that includes case studies documenting promising data mining practices in four public social service agencies, as well as Performance Pointers synthesizing the research literature related to the federal child welfare performance indicators. Earlier projects in the child welfare field have examined the quality of care in kinship and foster family care, factors associated with family reunification outcomes, education for foster children, and the relationship between child welfare agencies and legal professionals in the juvenile dependency system.
Identifying Strategies to Align Child Welfare and Addiction Treatment to Address the Opioid Crisis in Rural Ohio
The national opioid crisis has resulted in increased strain on public child welfare systems, which have reported an increase in the number of children in foster care due to maltreatment associated with parental substance use. In 2017, Ohio began implementing the Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START) intervention model, in an effort to facilitate coordination between the child welfare and substance abuse treatment system. Prior evidence suggests that when implemented as intended, START can facilitate parents' access to and completion of treatment, and increase their likelihood of reunifying with their children. However, START implementation is contingent on development of strong collaborative ties between child welfare and substance abuse treatment agencies, which can be challenging in practice.
Between 2019-2023, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, researchers at the Ohio State University and the Mack Center worked closely with the Public Children Services Association of Ohio to examine cross-system collaborative strategies associated with START implementation and explore the role that regional behavioral health boards may play in facilitating inter-agency collaboration among agencies in rural Ohio (Bunger et al., 2020; Bunger et al., 2024; Chuang et al., 2024).
Researchers at Ohio State University, the Mack Center, and Chestnut Health Systems subsequently received additional funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to work with the Public Children Services Association of Ohio to design, implement, and evaluate the impact of supportive training and coaching on staff retention, service timeliness, START implementation fidelity, and parent and family outcomes. Work on this project began in 2024 and is scheduled to continue through 2029.