Child Welfare Policies and Demographic Characteristics: A Compilation of State-Level Data is a suite of datasets gathered from various sources. All datasets in this suite contain information about states. It is intended to be a resource for researchers doing policy studies in the areas of foster care, adoption, and child abuse, and is intended as a supplement to the AFCARS and NCANDS datasets. It consists of five studies, their data, and final reports (if any).The common thread linking this suite of datasets is that the level of analysis is always states. This information can be used to group or classify states in some domain, coupled with using the AFCARS or NCANDS data to explore how states or groups of states compare. The intention is that this process will increase the value of AFCARS and NCANDS for analyzing the effects of policy differences across states. Most of the data were gleaned from reports published by academic or public interest organizations, such as The Urban Institute, the North American Council on Adoptable Children, or the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Each of these reports is available at the organization's web site, and is included in the files that accompany this User Guide in PDF format. The value of this compilation is in providing the data in a form that is readily readable by statistical programs such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata, and in compiling in one place the descriptions of the variables and values contained in the reports. Other data in this suite were collected from the United States Bureau of the Census and Wikipedia, a web-based encyclopedia.

Investigators: Hansen, Mary & Dineen, Michael