Week 3: Research that Benefits Children and Families

RESEARCH SERVICES

Child Trends helps people from local service organizations and national policymakers—assess, manage, and improve programs and policies that affect children’s lives.  

Child Trends has a long history of bringing experts and leaders together for rigorous research-based examinations of critical issues facing children and youth.  

In doing so, Child Trends help set research agendas and inform policy and practice decisions that move the field forward.

Child Trends’ research is informed by five principles:

• Measure It
  Child Trends measures the well-being of children and youth with rigor and precision. They identify critical issues, spot emerging trends, and deepen the public’s understanding of the opportunities and challenges that face the nation’s young people. When existing data do not capture all of the important dimensions of children’s lives, they develop and test new measures that expand the nation’s knowledge.

• Understand it
  They seek to understand what factors threaten healthy youth development, and what factors promote or enhance it. They want to know which programs and policies work to the benefit or detriment of children and youth—and how to make them better.

• Prove It
  They evaluate programs and interventions, with several goals in mind: to improve services and outcomes; to build the evidence base that will inspire new innovations; to enhance accountability; and to help programs focus on what is best for children. Their evaluations are rigorous, collaborative, dynamic, and relevant to policy and programs. They recognize that new evidence and changing circumstances require revisions to program models and evaluation strategies.

• Scale It
  Programs use their research findings to expand effectively or to better allocate resources to provide the most benefit to children and youth. Their work also builds the evidence base necessary for the field to design new program models and adapt proven interventions to new populations. In an era of limited resources, founders and policymakers want to invest in programs that are evidence-based.

• Share It
  They recognize the importance of sharing the results of their research to practitioners, policymakers, funding organizations, and the public. They continuously publish and distribute research reports, briefs and E-News updates to communicate knowledge and insights on children, youth, and families. They also convene meetings and webinars to bring together experts to discuss the well-being of our children and youth.

1.  Child Trends study children at every stage of development—from infancy to early adulthood, and across all the important domains of their lives, including health, cognition, and social/emotional well-being. 
2. Child Trends  recognize the importance of family, child care, schools, clubs, and other settings in shaping and influencing children’s development and well-being.
3.  At Child Trends, it’s not enough to study an issue – they also want to share what they have learned with people who can use it to improve children’s lives.
4.  Child Trends  are scientists first and foremost. Their work is accepted across the ideological spectrum as unbiased and nonpartisan.
5.  Research, policy, and practice for this population often focus on avoiding negative outcomes. Child Trends applies a broader lens, pursuing knowledge of how to promote positive outcomes as well.

Positive Examples of the Effects of Research on Children and Families

Child Trends conducts research, analyzes data, and evaluates programs in virtually every area in the child welfare field. There areas of expertise include prevention of maltreatment, child protection, court oversight, foster care, kinship care, adoption, and youth leaving care. They work closely with practitioners and policymakers who rely on our research and advice to make positive change in child welfare systems.

Child Trends recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids initiative, a program developed to promote adoption of children from foster care. In addition, the child welfare team is evaluating family finding programs across the country. They also conduct biennial state surveys examining the funding streams that support child welfare services.

CHILD WELFARE PROJECTS

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Evaluation of the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids Adoption Program

Child Trends was contracted by the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption (DTFA) to conduct a rigorous, multi-year evaluation of Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK), DTFA’s signature program focused on finding permanent families for waiting children in foster care. To evaluate the effectiveness of this child-focused approach, we carried out a randomized controlled trial in 25 WWK sites. Findings were initially released in 2011, and are summarized here: http://www.davethomasfoundation.org/about-foster-care-adoption/research/read-the-research.

Assessing how adopted foster youth fare as young adults

Child Trends, with funding from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption (DTFA), is assessing the well-being of young adults who had been adopted after the age of eight. The study will identify and interview those who entered foster care after age eight and were adopted through Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK), DTFA’s signature program that focuses on recruiting adoptive parents. Youth recruitment began in 2014, and the study is expected to last for 5 years.

References:

http://www.childtrends.org/our-research/projects/?t=261

Research to improve children's lives

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