Leveraging Harmonized Multi-System Administrative Data to Examine Experiences and Outcomes for Child Protective Services-Involved Children, Youth, and Families

The vast amount of administrative data collected in administering and delivering social welfare programs in the United States offers the potential to inform evidence-based decision-making and to enable better policy and program design, monitoring, and evaluation. Yet, such data are largely underutilized, given complexities involved in harmonizing and linking data from multiple agencies (potentially at multiple levels of government) with varying mandates, using different administrative data systems, collecting data for different purposes, and subject to different rules governing privacy, data sharing, and data utilization. Longstanding collaborations between researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) and leadership in multiple Wisconsin state agencies have resulted in the development of an extensive longitudinal linked administrative data system, known as the Wisconsin Administrative Data Core, which supports integrated analyses of earnings, income, multiple program participation trajectories, including CPS involvement, and well-being of individuals and families. The Data Core stands to provide a national model for state-level data integration and utilization efforts in the social welfare arena. This chapter first describes the Wisconsin Administrative Data Core and its development, highlighting key implications for similar efforts. It then summarizes five recent projects in the child welfare arena that have employed these integrated data.