Session: Rapids: A New Way to Use National Child Welfare Data (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

The Child Welfare System, including Child Protective Services (CPS) and foster care, is one of the largest family- and child- facing systems in the United States. Evidence based practice and policy require empirical data as a way to improve system responses. Fortunately, the federal government maintains CPS response data in the form of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect’s (NDACAN) National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) Files, and also the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) Files. Together, these files represent near-complete information on accepted hotline calls and foster care stays stretching back, for most states, to 2006. Despite the availability of these data, relatively little truly longitudinal work has been done using these sources in combination. This is because the files, particularly the AFCARS Files, can be challenging to manage and interpret across years. This symposium introduces RAPIDS, the Report and Placement Integrated Data System, which is a suite of SAS programs which are free for anyone to download. To use rapids, users will also have to obtain permission to download NCANDS and AFCARS Files from NDACAN. RAPIDS integrates the NCANDS and AFCARS Files. The program outputs a simple dataset structure which is optimized for user-friendliness and speed. RAPIDS was made possible by a consortium of coders at Washington University, the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and the Kempe Center and was funded with multiple federal grants. RAPIDS also includes variables drawn from the Census, various policy databases and a range of other sources. Other “value adds� exist in the form of a new “Family ID� variable, variables which show prior and later events for each episode, and user-friendly reformatted variables for constructs like race/ethnicity, maltreatment type and prior and future events. This symposium includes three papers. The first introduces RAPIDS in detail. The second two present research projects based on RAPIDS data. The first project seeks to better explore factors leading to serious outcomes within the child welfare system. The second project is a sequence analysis of CPS and foster care system contact, again for the first time at a national level. The RAPIDS program is publicly available on LDbase.