Building evidence of effective practice in child welfare requires practitioners and researchers to know the extent to which programs are implemented in order to understand evaluation results. Fidelity monitoring is a critical strategy for ensuring that evidence-based and promising practices are implemented as intended and can be studied in real-world contexts. This paper addresses challenges to measuring fidelity in child welfare systems and presents an approach taken with one state to define fidelity criteria and measure fidelity to a child safety intervention.

Share this article: