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| METHODOLOGY
Child Welfare Agency Poll The child welfare agency poll was conducted by telephone in November and December of 2000 by members of the Muskie project team. The team developed and used a data collection instrument that assessed areas in which meeting ASFA requirements might have impacted staff or changed the way the agency does business. The final instrument consisted of nine questions. (A copy of the final phone poll instrument appears in Appendix C in this document.) Most of the questions were open ended, allowing the interviewer to explore topics in some detail. The nine questions covered a variety of topics. They were:
This phone poll was conducted by contacting the office of the director of the division or department in each state that serves children and families. That office was asked to identify the person in that state who would be the best source of information about the implementation of the Adoption and Safe Families Act. Project team staff then contacted these individuals and conducted the poll that took approximately 30 minutes to complete over the phone. Responses were received from 47 states. Only the states of Georgia, Kansas, and New Hampshire did not respond. The information on county-administered states represents the responses of 11 states where the child welfare system is state supervised, county administered. Responses were also received from two states that are regionally administered Tennessee and Washington. One response was from a state with a bifurcated system, Nevada, where two large urban counties are county administered, while the rest of the state is state administered. Once the poll was completed, the projects team e-mailed or faxed a copy of the completed instrument to the respondent for review and comment. When the respondent's comments were returned, the project team coded and entered data into a statistical analysis program. Frequencies were run to enable the project team to get an overview of the results. Since respondents could give more than one response to a question, the percent figures used represent the total number of times each response was given divided by the total number of responses to that question. A complete print out of the frequencies appear in Appendices A and B. In addition, because a large portion of the data collected was qualitative, several direct quotes from the participants are presented in the Results portion of the report to more comprehensively explain the details of the responses. Court Improvement Project Poll The project team decided that a sample of opinions regarding implementation of ASFA from the court's perspective would be useful because meeting the requirements of ASFA often means increased collaboration and cooperation between child welfare agencies and court personnel. The team selected at random court improvement projects in four states. The four states selected were Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In each of these four states, the project team contacted the person who was listed as the director of the state's Court Improvement Project. That person was asked if he or she could respond to the poll or if he or she could suggest another person. Although the sample size was small, the team felt that information from even a few states would give them some idea of court issues regarding ASFA, this would result in some helpful 'best practices' and provide another perspective to the curriculum development process. The project team conducted the court improvement project part of the poll in January 2001. A data collection instrument, similar to the one used for the child welfare agency personnel, was developed to gather information about implementation of ASFA from the court improvement project's point of view. The poll took about 30 minutes to complete. (A copy of this instrument appears in Appendix D.) The questions covered a variety of topics. They were:
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