The passage of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-272) significantly reoriented child welfare services from a system which focused on foster care placement to one which was intended to provide the services necessary to maintain children in their own homes. In response to the provisions of the law, state and county child welfare agencies developed new social service programs and sought new avenues for coordinating with other components of the human service delivery system.The purpose of the National Study of Protective, Preventive, and Reunification Services Delivered to Children and Their Families, 1994, is to provide a reliable national picture of the children and families in the ìnewî child welfare system. The study is designed not only to describe the current delivery system in terms of the number and characteristics of the children and families served by service type, but also to examine how agency, service, and client characteristics relate to case status. The dataset consists of three files. The main case file includes 2,109 observations and 1,205 variables. It includes information about the number, types and services provided to children and their families, with an emphasis on differences in annual and point-in-time data, case duration, in-home and out-of-home services, race and kinship care. Two additional files are provided to separate out the repeating records. These files augment the main case file and contain 11,335 observations and 25 variables about household members and their characteristics and delineation of children receiving services.

Investigators: Maza, Penny