November 10, 2006

National Study on Differential Response in Child Welfare

This report titled National Study on Differential Response in Child Welfare written by Lisa Merkel-Holguin, Caren Kaplan, and Alina Kwak, focuses on differential response, which is an approach to child maltreatment reports that allows Child Protective Services (CPS) to ?recognize the variety in the nature of reports and that one approach does not meet the needs of every case?. This report provides results from a descriptive survey composed of 17 questions that were nominal and mutually exclusive. A copy of the survey can be found at the conclusion of the report.

The report is divided into three main sections. The first section provides the national overview of the summative results from the differential response survey. The second section includes differential response implementation variability from both state and county profiles. Lastly, appendices are given that outline a bibliography on differential response.