Welcome to the Evidence Based Practice Tool!
This web-based tool provides you with easy access to:

THE RESEARCH - A review of the child welfare research evidence on
factors associated with the six major CFSR outcome measures, and …
POSSIBLE STEPS TO TAKE - Several action steps to consider when
designing program improvements as indicated or implicated by the
research.
Evidence-based practices are those practices, documented in the
research literature, that have demonstrated replicable, reliable
outcomes. These practices may be direct service practices or
administrative/policy practices.

Advisory: the EBP tool was compiled between late summer 2002 and
fall 2003 and thus reflects research available at that time. You are
encouraged to also seek out more recent research literature.

THE RESEARCH

In the Evidence Based Practice Tool, you will find child welfare
research categorized by five factors: 1) child, 2) family, 3)
organizational, 4) service, and 5) community factors. Variables that
are part of each of these factors have been shown to be associated
with the six aggregate outcome measures used in the Child and Family
Services Reviews. These six factors are (stated positively):

Timely reunification
Maintain permanency upon leaving care
Timely adoption
Placement stability
Preventing maltreatment recurrence
Child safety in care
Level of Evidence - In the Evidence Based Practice Tool, research
studies have been divided into two categories: those demonstrating a
high level of evidence and those with a medium level of evidence.
The two ratings were based on a system developed by the Child
Welfare League of America. Selection criteria included level of
research rigor, reliability of data, generalizability of the study,
and replicability of the study.

Click on each of the links above to see the evidence that is
assocaited with each of the outcomes.

Click on the link EBP Bibliography on the left to open a pdf file of
the references in each of these six areas.

POSSIBLE STEPS TO TAKE

In each outcome area, we provide action steps you may consider in
designing program improvements. Under "Possible Steps to Take" you
will find suggestions for undertaking more in-depth research, as
well as administrative and practice-based ideas. We also give you
links to other resources that may provide you with information about
how to improve a particular outcome in your agency. We hope that
these action ideas will be a helpful starting point in your efforts
to improve performance.

Links to Other Research Summaries (click on each link, below)

http://cfrcwww.social.uiuc.edu/respract/resprac1.htm
Put together by the University of Illinois. This is a great site
even though there are some initial navigational challenges.
http://www.americanhumane.org/site/PageServer?
pagename=pc_best_practice_casey_homepage This is a cooperative
project between American Humane Assoc and Casey that provides some
nice, almost cookbook-like decision tree protocols for specific
kinds of cases.
http://www.cwla.org/programs/r2p/default.htm
This is CWLA's Research to Practice website. They are doing some
very nice work in doing comprehensive reviews of the child welfare
literature.
http://dcfswebresource.prairienet.org/
The State of Illinois has put a lot of work into integrating
research and practice/policy. There is a lot of good information on
this site, even though they have made it specific to Illinois.




http://www.rom.ku.edu/EBP_Main.asp

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