Too Much, Too Little, or Just Right? How Integrated Data Helps Identify Impact and Opportunity

Child maltreatment is one of the costliest public health issues at the child, family, and societal levels and yet the child protective service system (also sometimes called child welfare) receives relatively few resources (Jonson-Reid & Drake, 2018). Child welfare has the responsibility of providing the most effective services possible to assure the safety of a child while prioritizing preserving the family (with very constrained resources). Indeed, most of the direct services relied upon to achieve these resources are provided by agencies referred to or contracted by CPS, not CPS itself (Jonson-Reid et al., Violence Vict 32(1):93–109, 2017). Those organizations also generally operate under resource constraints. It is therefore absolutely essential that we identify the sweet spot for providing services that are as (1) effective as possible but also (2) optimized acrossthe resource and practical constraints that CPS and affiliated agencies operate within. The use of integrated data may help us find child welfare’s Goldilocks Zone.