Human Capital, Child Well-Being and Child Protection

15th November 2018 : 14:00 - 15:30

Category: Seminar

Research Group: Rees Centre

Speaker: Fred Wulczyn, Chapin Hall University of Chicago

Dr Wulczyn will propose a framework to add human capital to the list of outcomes that child welfare agencies focus on when thinking about child well-being.

With a focus on children being both free to develop as well as free from adversity, the seminar will comprise three sections. The first includes the definition of human capital and the advantages of the concept over and above the general concept of well-being. The second includes the introduction of a conceptual model and a mathematical framework for using human capital as the basis for child welfare studies, to provide guidance about how the framework might be used in empirical research. The seminar will close with a discussion, and an opportunity for questions about policy and practice implications of the proposed approach.

Dr Fred Wulczyn is a Senior Research Fellow and the Director of the Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall, University of Chicago. The work of the Data Center is organised around the use of research evidence in public and private child welfare agencies. A core asset of the Data Center is the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive, which for more than 25 years has been an important source of research evidence used by public and private child welfare agencies to manage their programs.

Dr Wulczyn’s work has focused on how states respond to children who are unable to live at home. He brings a multidisciplinary perspective to this work, drawing inspiration from disciplines such as mathematics, population biology, human development, sociology, system dynamics, and social work. His contributions to research evidence use focuses on the evidence needed to operate complex systems. In addition, his current work on human capital formation in New York City addresses the way policymakers think about child wellbeing and public investment in children.