Data justice for youth in care: mapping the data assets of Ontario's child welfare system

This guest post was co-authored by Kody Crowell and McGill University Professor Naomi Nichols. It is the first blog post in a series of two describing the collaboration between Powered by Data and Dr. Nichols in identifying and outlining the data assets and processes used by Ontario’s child welfare system as part of a larger five-year Social Sciences and Humanities (SSHRC) initiative called “Data Justice: Fostering equitable data-led strategies to prevent, reduce and end youth homelessness.” We are excited to share the future findings our project will yield and invite your feedback. Questions and comments may be directed to the principal investigator, Naomi Nichols, at <naomi.nichols@mcgill.ca>. We are particularly interested in feedback and comments related to our data asset map, which can be accessed here.

This first blog post defines the concept of data justice and describes our research activities and outcomes. Click here for the second part, where we explain why we think this work matters and indicate the change we hope to generate as a result of our work.

For the last six months, we have been working to identify all of the data assets and data processes used by Ontario’s child welfare system. This small project is part of a larger five-year Social Sciences and Humanities (SSHRC) initiative called Data Justice: Fostering equitable data-led strategies to prevent, reduce and end youth homelessness. This larger initiative is examining the turn towards data-led governance and service delivery processes in Canada, paying particular attention to the ways that data-driven reforms influence the lives and wellbeing of young people living in poverty and experiencing housing instability. 

What is ‘data justice’? How does it affect youth in care?

The move by the public sector to embrace data-led governance has introduced an entirely new range of monitoring, evaluative, and predictive technologies that organize and administer the lives of those they serve. Such technologies promise greater efficiency and standardization. However, in the absence of proper accountability, child welfare agencies risk over-surveilling youth in care, a population that already has little control over their own representation. If left unchecked, data-led processes may result in punitive policies and unfair service provision, serving the aims of institutional risk management, rather than improving outcomes for youth. They may also further reinforce power differences between those who are able to make use of the data, and those who are not. Indeed, within many data-led practices, there is a divide between those who collect, store, access, and analyse data and those whom the data collection targets. 

What is the data justice project?

With this in mind, our project seeks to investigate and proactively intervene in the Ontario government’s move to embrace data-led governance in the child welfare system. Specifically, we are exploring how data-led and “evidence-based” governance processes influence housing and social outcomes among Ontario youth in and leaving care (YILC). To such an end, we have sought to map the “data ecosystem” relevant to Ontario YILC.  Thus far, our investigative work has involved the use of traditional and digital ethnographic methods to identify the data assets held by various institutional bodies that interact with YILC and to learn as much as possible about how each of these data assets are structured, stored, managed, accessed, and used to govern young people’s lives. 

We began our research by reaching out to the Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services (MCCSS), which oversees 49 independent Children’s Aid Societies (CAS) that are mandated to deliver child protection services for a specific region. After receiving a list of data assets that primarily pertain to the business side of child welfare, we reached out to the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies (OACAS) and a number of key informants who have worked in and with the child welfare system across the province to learn more about data collection processes that pertain more directly to the experiences of youth. We applied all of the things we learned from these conversations to create a provincial data asset map. 

The first iteration of the data asset map was completed mid-April. It shows the typical data journey for a young person in care. Data is collected at specific points in a young person’s life: from the moment of birth to well after graduation, youth are tracked via a number of instruments and measures. These data assets are organized according to different elements -- identifiers, identifying records, datasets, databases -- all color-coded according to their ownership. For the most up-to-date version of the data asset map, click here.

Our research seeks to privilege the rights and well-being of YILC; as such, our interest is in how data processes shape the governance, policy, and programmatic contexts that influence YILC experiences in care. Pragmatically, this means that we intend for our work to contribute to the creation of equitable interventions that seek to modify the data ecosystem. Currently, we are preparing to share our map with key stakeholders, including young people who are currently or have historically been involved with the child welfare system in Canada in order to validate and improve our map, and engage in conversations with them about how it could be used (e.g., to guide targeted advocacy efforts or to identify systemic data gaps). 

The next phase of our research will be to identify (in consultation with stakeholders) key places on the map that warrant further investigation. For example, during the research we did to produce our map, we learned that in some jurisdictions, young people transitioning from care are recorded as housed when they are transitioned from care into the youth or adult sheltering system. For housing and homelessness researchers and practitioners, a young person in the shelter system is not understood to be housed. Moving forward, we will want to document how child welfare workers and those responsible for inputting child welfare data into the Child Protection Information Network (CPIN) are actually making sense of their complex interactions with youth, the interventions young people participate in and the outcomes of their care, such that any potentially problematic data processes can be identified and re-imagined to ensure that they actually serve the needs of Ontario’s young people in care.