Developing a Partnership with Child Welfare Posted on March 1, 2006 Cassandra Simmel (bio) discusses what it takes to partner with child welfare agencies.

Well, the particular set of challenges that I face in doing research in the child welfare area is it's a very growing field as far as research is concerned. In the past 10 years we're just seeing a large increase in the kinds of research that's being done - larger scale projects, doing random assignment studies. So that entails a lot of coordination with child welfare systems, with social service agencies, so it takes a long time to get these kinds of research projects off the ground.

These agencies are under tremendous scrutiny these days. They are extremely stressed by their own budgetary constraints as well as this is a very high-risk population to work with. It takes a lot of just methodical introductions, working with child welfare agencies and social service agencies and trying to explain your own research ideas and also listen to them and try to do something that's of service with them.

I really want to underscore how prepared you have to be to really develop a partnership with child welfare agencies. I'm currently trying to partner with a couple different state child welfare agencies and explore what sorts of opportunities, something they want to learn more about, as well as something that meets my needs as well.

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