AFCARS Fact Sheet
Race and Hispanic Origin
Since 1994, by Federal law and regulation, States have been required to collect case level information on all children for whom the State child welfare agency has responsibility for placement, care or supervision and on children adopted under the auspices of the State's public child welfare agency. AFCARS also includes information on foster and adoptive parents. The information required by AFCARS is what would normally be collected during the course of a social worker's assessment, planning, and service provision, so additional information does not need to be collected solely for the purpose of meeting AFCARS requirements. ACF uses the data for many purposes, such as responding to requests from Congress and the public for current data on children in foster care or those who have been adopted; policy decisions; budget decisions and State allocations; monitoring; and technical assistance to States.
The information collected and reported via AFCARS is critical to the Federal government and is used to determine a state’s level of compliance with the national standards on child safety, permanency, and well-being. In connection with these standards all states have undergone a Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) and have developed a CFSR-related Program Improvement Plan (PIP). States with an operational Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS) either have had or will have their automated information system reviewed and, at some point, all states are expected to have an AFCARS Assessment Review.
The information provided below addresses one of the errors identified during the AFCARS Assessment Review process. This information is intended to assist reporting agencies in improving the quantity and quality of the information that they report via AFCARS.
Examples of Errors Identified During the AFCARS Assessment Reviews:
A State’s automated information system MUST support a worker’s ability to select multiple racial categories for all clients or to select “Unable to Determine” if a client is abandoned or refuses to give their racial information.
In addition to asking clients about their racial information workers MUST ask if a client is of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity or not and record that information in the state’s automated information system. Racial and ethnic information should be collected and stored as separate pieces of information about the client.
Race and ethnicity information is based on how a client perceives him/herself, or in the case of young children, how the parent identifies the child. Workers must ask clients this information and not make assumptions on which and how many races a person may be and whether the client is Hispanic or Latino or not. When a worker, rather than the client, makes this determination, he or she may be under-representing all possible races.
A worker can prepare the client for this question by stating: “I recognize that many people identify with more than one race and identify with a specific ethnic group.” The worker can then ask the client what race or races he/she identifies with and what ethnic group, if any. If the client isn’t sure about an ethnicity, the worker can give examples, such as, Spanish, Latino, Hispanic, etc.
For AFCARS extraction and submission purposes, information not collected or not available for a particular client record (for whatever reason) is mapped as all blanks (not all zeros, all 9’s, etc.). Missing information should never be mapped to a valid AFCARS value.
Technical Assistance: Technical assistance may be obtained from the Children’s Bureau’s National Resource Center for Child Welfare Data and Technology (NRC-CWDT). The Resource Center can be contacted at (877) 672-4829, or at its web page: http://www.nrccwdt.org. If you wish to request on-site technical assistance from the NRC-CWDT, contact your ACF Regional Office.
