NDACAN’s federal funding renewed

December 18, 2015

NDACAN staff - front row, l. to r.: Michael Dineen, Diane Wach, Elliott Smith; back row: Andres Arroyo, John Eckenrode, Christopher Wildeman, Holly Larrabee

Congrats to the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN)! NDACAN has been awarded a new federal contract to continue operating in the BCTR. The sponsor is the Children’s Bureau within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Administration for Children and Families (ACF). While NDACAN (founded in 1988) has been funded by the Children's Bureau since 2001, the previous cooperative agreement was replaced this year with a competitive contract.

NDACAN is a centralized facility for the acquisition, preservation, and dissemination of machine-readable data sets relevant to the study of child maltreatment, child welfare, and adoption/foster care and promotes secondary analysis of these data sets. There is no charge for receiving NDACAN data sets, and NDACAN provides free technical support to facilitate their use.

Under the new contract NDACAN will continue to provide the same services and maintain all the components of the successful archive they have developed over their 27 years in operation. The BCTR and NDACAN are pleased to announce that under the new contract, Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management and BCTR Fellow Christopher Wildeman will serve as co-director alongside NDACAN director John Eckenrode. One change under the terms of the new contract will redesign NDACAN’s Summer Research Institute as a distance learning event. For over 20 years this annual, week-long event has brought about 15 researchers to campus for an intensive secondary data analysis experience, providing support to participants working on their own research projects using NDACAN data.