How Legal Professionals Can Use the Compendium of Measures and Data Sources: Understanding Judicial Decision-Making and Hearing Quality in Child Welfare

Legal professionals are in a unique position to collect and analyze data to strengthen practices around child welfare hearings. Before they can effect change, they need to understand what aspects of hearings can be measured and the tools available to do so.

This document explains how judges, attorneys, and other legal professionals can use a detailed compendium of measures and data sources released in summer 2021. Examples include showing the legal community—

• How child welfare court hearings have been evaluated and what research measures have been used
• The role of research, measures, and data sources in a court’s efforts to improve child welfare court hearings
• How to partner with researchers to strengthen child welfare court hearings through research

Designed for a nonresearch audience, the overview explains the value of measures as a research tool and lays out the compendium’s format, which includes a table of measures, nearly 50 measure profiles, and a table of data sources.