Integrated Historical Child Welfare Database

The Integrated Historical Child Welfare Database compiles aggregate, historical administrative data from the United States between 1945 and 2021. Measures include children receiving child welfare services, expenditures on child welfare services, child welfare services personnel, and children entering, in, or exiting out-of-home care. By combining multiple sources of data and by standardizing measures, the IHCWD enables analysis of long-term trends, geographic variation, and population differences in the child welfare system and the children interacting with it. IHCWD data can be linked to other NDACAN data or to external data at the state-year level, enabling various research designs using demographic and causal inference techniques.
The IHCWD contains novel aggregate data from historical child welfare publications, namely the Children’s Bureau Statistical Series (1945–1968) and the National Center for Social Statistics (1970, 1973–1975). These are combined with aggregate data from the Voluntary Cooperative Information System (1982–1995; NDACAN Dataset 247) and the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (1995–2021; NDACAN Datasets 73, 80, 82, 86, 91, 97, 101, 105, 118, 124, 131, 137, 143, 149, 153, 163, 167, 176, 187, 192, 200, 215, 225, 235, 239, 255, and 274).
The IHCWD is a unique and powerful resource for conducting comparative and longitudinal research, but it contains many significant limitations of which users should be aware. Users should read the User’s Guide fully and carefully in order to use the data responsibly.