The National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW), a longitudinal study of child abuse and neglect, was established in 1996 by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in response to a Congressional mandate. The NSCAW project, conducted by RTI under a contract with ACF, produced five full waves of nationally representative data collected from over 6,200 children, caregivers, caseworkers, and teachers between 1999 and 2005. WRMA became a subcontractor to RTI for the NSCAW II contract, which began in 2006. Data collection with a new cohort of children began in 2008. Child outcomes of interest include health and physical well-being, cognitive and school performance, mental health, behavior problems, and social functioning and relationships.
WRMA's role on this project is to facilitate the acquisition of administrative data on children and families, such as NCANDS and AFCARS data, and prepare these data to be appended to the NSCAW II datasets. These data will fill any gaps in information on key variables that caseworkers may not be able or available to provide. Key variables to be collected from administrative data and appended to the child record include placements/living environments, service utilization, rereports of abuse or neglect, information on the perpetrator of abuse or neglect, and placements in foster care. WRMA staff will be collaborating with RTI information technology staff, as well as state representatives, to oversee submission of administrative data files and assist RTI staff members with the process of linking sampling, NCANDS and AFCARS files.
In addition, WRMA gathers and provides community-level data from census and other public use files for each of the counties in the study, including demographic, educational, and crime information.
