This project represented an innovative effort to link research with large-scale, standardized case data collection by the National Children’s Alliance (NCA), the membership organization of Children’s Advocacy Centers. NCAtrak is a national data system and provides a standardized method for entering, organizing, retrieving, aggregating and protecting information about each case. It gathers information on the child, family and alleged perpetrator; child protection and police investigations; service response; multidisciplinary team activities; and a variety of outcomes.
Because of the detailed record it produces on each case, NCAtrak presents tremendous potential for research on CACs in particular but also on the response to child abuse allegations in general. Though NCAtrak can provide brief statistical reports, it is simply not configured now to do a full statistical analysis, to compare subgroups of CACs or cases, or to identify what variables might predict favorable. This project engaged an experienced child maltreatment research team in a partnership with NCA for development of critical, new knowledge, and new methods for doing future CAC research.
In this exploratory study, we used data from one CAC (N = 632) to examine the feasibility of using NCAtrak, a national computerized, Web-based case tracking system, to examine criminal disposition timeframes in child abuse cases (Walsh et al., 2024). The system data indicated that the time frame for the cases to be criminally resolved varied widely. About one in four child physical and sexual abuse cases with adult offenders took more than one year to reach a final disposition. About 11% of child sexual abuse cases with juvenile offenders took more than one year to reach a criminal disposition. We encourage child advocacy centers using computer-based data systems to think of additional ways they might use this potentially rich source of data.
Walsh, W.A., Jones, L.M., & Swiecicki, C. (2014). Using case tracking data from a child advocacy center to examine criminal disposition times for child abuse cases. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 23(2), 198-216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10538712.2014.868386
