ABSTRACT
Common sense suggests that interest in child well-being is a positive, albeit belated development. The lack of evidence is hampered by theoretical traditions that have given short shrift to the sort of developmental perspective required to understand well-being in the context of child welfare services. The research traditions—the bio-ecological/life course perspective on human development and the public health approach to using observational data to understand the scope of a problem—provide frameworks for organizing evidence. Evidence-based policymaking does not replace ideology, social values, or political expediency in the policymaking process. The original evidence comes from three large studies of child maltreatment, foster care, and child well-being: the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive, and the National Study of Child and Adolescent Well-Being. As child welfare policy has evolved in recent years, the working assumption has been that "safety, permanency, and well-being" is an accurate expression of priorities for the child welfare system.
