Evaluation and Data Use

The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) partnered with the Virginia Department of Social Services (VDSS) in 2017 to conduct research examining the efficacy of technology interventions aimed at reducing child welfare staff turnove

Public child welfare agencies continually struggle with how to address issues of staff recruitment and retention. Furthermore, very little evidence exists regarding what works to attract, select, and retain talented staff.

Check out this article, "Conducting Comprehensive Workforce Needs Assessments in Child Welfare," by the QIC-WD team.

This post highlights a few tips the QIC-WD shared with a group of human services training evaluators about how to effectively use and share data with child welfare providers and administrators.

The QIC-WD uses logic models—visual representations that depict the resources that go into and expected results that will come out of the implementation of a program—to guide the implementation and evaluation of the selected interventions.

Want to learn to conduct a needs assessment that will identify the root causes of your child welfare workforce challenges?

A strong relationship between two things isn’t enough to prove that one causes the other. Listen to this TED talk or check out these spurious correlations!

Communicating complex ideas to diverse stakeholders is central to reliable decision making. Well-designed data visualizations provide a platform for engaging stakeholders in ways that are tailored to their interest, familiarity, and expertise.

Michelle Graef, QIC-WD Project Director, shares an example of what the QIC-WD is learning: child welfare and human resources divisions need to work together to identify and address workforce issues.

Anita Barbee, QIC-WD Evaluation Team Lead, describes how the evaluation team will examine various QIC-WD activities, including site selection and the implementation of the interventions.