National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being
The National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) is a series of longitudinal studies sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These congressionally mandated, $74-million projects are the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken of the child welfare system. NSCAW is the first national study that examines child and family well-being outcomes in detail and seeks to relate those outcomes to their experience with the child welfare system. The NSCAW I and II studies have been carried out over a 12-year period since September 1997. The current contract extends work through September 2011.
The first cohort included children who were involved in an investigation of child abuse or neglect that closed November 1999 through January 2001. These children and their families were followed for approximately seven years after the index investigation. The sample included a cohort of over 6,200 children and adolescents selected from a national sample of child welfare agencies located in 92 primary sampling units (PSUs) across the country.
Similarly, the second cohort of almost 6,000 children from 81 NSCAW I PSUs were selected from investigations that closed February 2008 through April 2009. The follow-up of the NSCAW II children is currently slated through an 18-month period. RTI's national staff of field interviewers use laptop computers to conduct computer-assisted personal interviews with the children, parents, caregivers, and caseworkers. Teachers are surveyed by mail or online.
RTI developed the technique of composite size measure sampling used to select the NSCAW I PSUs. Composite size measure sampling allows every child to have an equal chance of being selected, even when the PSUs are selected with unequal probabilities and when researchers are oversampling for various characteristics of children (e.g., infants, children receiving services or in foster care, and those in NSCAW I as victims of sexual abuse).
RTI staff also developed an innovative system for quality control—computer-aided recorded interviewing—for NSCAW I. With this system, the computer records random intervals of the interviewer-respondent exchange for review in the central office. Neither the interviewer nor the respondent is aware of the recording process. The system is used to both validate field work and provide interviewers with feedback on the quality of their work.
NSCAW also relies on RTI's expertise in tracing operations, requiring us to trace some of the most difficult subjects in terms of their demographics:
- Subjects with low socioeconomic status
- Minors who are unwed parents
- Minor children
- Alternate caregivers of those minor children
Numerous reports from NSCAW I are available on the ACF Web site. NSCAW data can be accessed by licensing agreement through the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect.
rti.org