Introduction
The National Resource Center for Child Welfare Data and Technology is pleased to present the New Jersey AFCARS Annual File Construction Microsoft Access Database. This database was presented at the 2001 NRC-CWDT Data Conference: Making IT Work for Child Safety, Permanency, and Well-being.

History
Donna L. Perna from the State of New Jersey, Division of Youth & Family Services, Office of Information Systems
developed the database. The purpose of the database is to provide a means for New Jersey to produce canned reports to
compare their AFCARS data to the Children's Bureau outcomes. The database provided New Jersey with the ability to
recreate the 1998 and 1999 AFCARS Annual files used by the Children's Bureau for Federal reporting. Essentially New
Jersey was able to duplicate the numbers for each of the sub populations used in the AFCARS Annual file construction. As a
result, this utility has enabled New Jersey to make internal policy decisions based on their AFCARS data with greater
confidence.

• Import biannual foster care and adoption detail files used for AFCARS reviews; and
  
• Create the annual file used in the Child Welfare Outcomes Annual Report and other Federal reporting.
  
  

• Import requires a fixed width text file format according to the AFCARS requirements.
  
• The utility makes the assumption that data for the 1999B period or earlier contains the old race data file formatting.
  
• For report periods 2000A or later, it requires changes stated in the Program Instruction (PI), ACYF-CB-PI-99-01 on AFCARS collection of race data.
• The utility make the assumption that the foster care and adoption portions of the AFCARS file have been made into separate files prior to import. If the state chooses not to separate the 2 parts before importing, they must import the entire file twice (once as the adoption file and once as the foster care file) then delete the adoption records out of the foster care table and vice versa before attempting to construct the annual files.
  
• The utility makes the assumption that record IDs are consistent over years - if they are not, the annual file will not be accurate because records will be duplicated.
• Look at the design of your imported tables. Verify that the ID numbers (element number four for Foster Care and element number three for Adoption) are a "numbered" data type and are marked as "Indexed: Yes (No Duplicates)."
  

• Feel free to make modifications to the utility as needed. However, modifications may produce unintended results that cannot be guaranteed,
  
• The data files used by the Children's Bureau have been processed through the Data Quality Utility (DQU), which removes data based on edits that check for data inconsistencies within each record (see Technical Bulletin #9A); and
  
• This utility uses Microsoft Access, which may result in slight variations as compared to the SPSS output utilized by the Children's Bureau to produce the data profiles.

A copy of the AFCARS Annual File Construction Microsoft Access Database is available for downloading through this site. A copy of the AFCARS Annual File Construction Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, which provides guidance on the database, is also available for downloading through this web site. It can also be viewed in text format.

If you have comments, questions, or need technical assistance on using the database, please contact us at www.nrccwdt.org or by phone at (877) 672-4829. We would also appreciate feedback on how the utility has worked for you so that we can provide insight to other States. Thank you.