Sunday, 16 January 2005 - 10:30 AM

This presentation is part of: Findings from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW): Applying Innovative Methods to Understanding Services and Outcomes for Maltreated Children

The State of the NSCAW Sample

NSCAW has completed data collection on children and caregivers at 36-months post entry into child welfare services (CWS). Data have been collected at Wave 1 (Baseline, BL), Wave 2 (12-Months—a partial data collection that was for panel maintenance and gathering of information from child welfare workers), Wave 3 (18-Months), and Wave 4 (36-Months). The weighted response rate at baseline was just under 70% for the key respondents. Wave 4 response rates for the CWS/CPS intake study was 85%, overall including 91% of children in out-of-home care and 85% of children at home. There was almost no variation for county characteristics (e.g., urban and rural and county size) or for abuse type (i.e., sexual abuse or not). There was some variation across strata, with 7 strata having a response rate higher than 90%, two having a response rate in the 80% range, and one below 80%. On average the child and caregiver interviews were completed within 1.5 months of the target of 36-months. release and restricted release data will be discussed and analytic issues that have arisen will be addressed. Choices made in the construction of derived variables will be presented. Non-response resulted from refusals (less than 6% of cases), unlocatable (less than 4%), and other (less than 3%). Although only 51% of all potential eligible cases (i.e., starting with an assumption that we should have obtained 100% of the original sample) are in the wave 4 data, , the data are remarkably unbiased. Comparisons between responders and nonresponders of approximately 150 case characteristics of children at baseline shows that only 17 variables are different at the .05 level, 11 are significant at the .01 level and only one (out-of-home care) was different to an extent which exceeded 5%. These modest unweighted differences can be adjusted with re-weighting of the wave 4 data so that it further mitigates the minor nonresponse differences. Mandatory reporting across waves was minimal with less than 4% of cases becoming involved with reporting because of indications that a child had been victimized by maltreatment or was suicidal. There were more than 32,000 child and caregiver interviews completed about more than 6,000 children resulting in only 218 reports (less than 1% of all interviews resulted in a report). The entire wave 4 restricted release data set will become available in early fall of 2004. This is now available at the Cornell Archive. Features of the general The status of the public release data and other NSCAW-related resources will be discussed, as well as the results of efforts to maintain the panel and collect data from the CWS agencies about child abuse reports that may not have been indicated in the interviews with families that no longer had open cases.

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