Ontario Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (2010-2012)
Principal Investigator: Aron Shlonsky, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto
Funded by: Leaders Opportunity Fund, Canada Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Research Fund,
Ministry of Research and Innovation
Although Canada prides itself on its well-developed social safety net, our ability to monitor, evaluate, and improve services is undermined by our inability to gather and utilize information. In few areas is this shortcoming more apparent than child welfare, and in no province is child welfare reporting infrastructure as under-developed as it is in Ontario. Regrettably, this lack of information limits our ability to provide creative and effective services for some of Canada’s most vulnerable children and families. While there has been some progress in Canada in developing viable reporting infrastructure, provincial administrative databases that contain longitudinal data have been poorly structured for data extraction and subsequent in-depth analysis, and there is currently no nationally representative, longitudinal database of child welfare services. The Ontario Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (OCANDS) provides the crucial infrastructure needed to respond to these challenges by creating a child welfare data laboratory at the University of Toronto that contains high quality, longitudinal data that will be used to foster informed, ground-breaking child welfare service and policy development in Ontario and across Canada. Specifically, the project will: 1) Construct Ontario’s first longitudinal database of child maltreatment services, the Ontario Children’s Services Database (OCSD), including dynamic reporting features that generate reports on crucial indicators for individual agencies, clusters of agencies, and the entire province; 2) House these child welfare resources in a physical laboratory, facilitating an efficient, resource-rich environment in which to conduct leading edge research in child welfare services.