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.