Using risk adjustment approaches in child welfare performance measurement: Applications and insights from health and mental health settings

Ramesh Raghavan

Children and Youth Services Review, 2010, vol. 32, issue 1, 103-112

Abstract: Federal policymaking in the last decade has dramatically expanded performance measurement within child welfare systems, and states are currently being fiscally penalized for poor performance on defined outcomes. However, in contrast to performance measurement in health settings, current policy holds child welfare systems solely responsible for meeting outcomes, largely without taking into account the effects of factors at the level of the child, and his or her social ecology, that might undermine the performance of child welfare agencies. Appropriate measurement of performance is predicated upon the ability to disentangle individual, as opposed to organizational, determinants of outcomes, which is the goal of risk adjustment methodologies. This review briefly conceptualizes and examines risk adjustment approaches in health and child welfare, suggests approaches to expanding its use to appropriately measure the performance of child welfare agencies, and highlights research gaps that diminish the appropriate use of risk adjustment approaches -- and which consequently suggest the need for caution -- in policymaking around performance measurement of child welfare agencies.

Keywords: Child; welfare; Performance; measurement; Quality; improvement; Mental; health; Performance; assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190-7409(09)00199-6
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:32:y:2010:i:1:p:103-112

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().