Database Preview
We welcome visitors to www.NCLNetwork.org and the NCLN Legal Services Outcomes Database. Due to privacy and confidentiality concerns, the actual database is password-protected and available only to members of NCLN. Please preview the database via these screen shots so that you can understand the concept and the structure.
Working together for several years, NCLN members developed this outcomes database so that it can:
- Apply to varied children’s law shops representing different case mixes.
- Allow a single, online data input point by the case handler at case closing, capturing a reflective assessment of direction and effectiveness, and also providing content for experiential review with volunteers or students.
- Emphasize whole-child representation requiring child-centered advocacy within as broad a range of courts and social service sectors as the child needs, or the older child wishes, depending on the local representation model.
- Take into account that children’s lawyers can control neither the direct services nor the public institutions that affect their clients and their families, but can nonetheless study their own effectiveness in advocating and negotiating for a whole range of goals concerning liberty, permanency, health and education outcomes for their clients.
- Track and study case strategies, investment of time and other resources, information about which needed services are systemically unavailable or difficult for clients to access, and then link them to outcomes in order to inform and influence practice.
- Help to define what strategies lead to the highest quality of child representation.
- Provide for considerable qualitative narrative to deepen and enrich the understanding of quality legal representation and client outcomes.
- Begin to amass data on program strategies and outcomes across the country while maintaining high levels of security.
Click on the buttons below to review some of the database's sections:
Organizations interested in learning more about the development of the Legal Services Outcomes Database may contact one of the NCLN Partners or M. Christine Kenty, Ph.D., Director of Research and Evaluation at the Support Center for Child Advocates (ChrisK@advokid.org).
