Expert

Scott Huhr

Senior Researcher

Impact Areas
Contact Information
773-308-3109

Scott Huhr is a Senior Researcher at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. Huhr is interested in applying quantitative tools to various child welfare, education, and other social policy areas. Huhr’s current work includes measuring public and private child agency performances, analyzing the impacts of government policies and intervention programs, and constructing various complex prediction models and metrics, including placement stability and permanency predictions.

Previously, Huhr conducted trajectory analysis on placement, recurrence, and postdischarge maltreatment of children placed in foster care; analyzed Medicaid spending trajectories; measured different public policy impacts on adoptions using multistate data and identified differential impacts based on different time spans; and evaluated the impacts of the Keep program and Child Success New York City. Prior to joining Chapin Hall, as the Lead Researcher at the Chicago Board of Education, Huhr constructed Rasch measures for parent surveys and built numerous metrics and prediction models, including Student Gunshot Victim Prediction, Early Grades On-Track Prediction, AP and College Enrollment On-Track Prediction, Elementary On-Track Metric, School Safety Value-Added Metric, and School and Teacher Value-Added Metric.

Huhr holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago and is a CPS Value-Added technical advisory board member.

Master of Public Policy, the University of Chicago

Wulczyn, F., Cosgrove, J., Rose, R., & Huhr, S. (2022). Beyond Randomized Controlled Trials: Integrating Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Causal Inference with Observational Data. Presented at Society for Social Work and Research.

Huhr, S. (2021). Preventing Placement in Foster Care: Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Design. Presented at Society for Social Work and Research.

Huhr, S., & Wulczyn, F. (2020). Placement Prevention in the Family First Context. Accepted at Research and Policy Conference on Child, Adolescent, and Young Adult Behavioral Health.

Huhr, S., & Wulczyn, F. (2022). Do intensive in-home services prevent placement?: A case study of Youth Villages’ Intercept program. Children and Youth Services Review. doi: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2021.106294

Cosgrove, J., Rose, R., Lee, B., Huhr, S., & Wulczyn, F. (2022). Reducing confounding bias in non-experimental evaluation: An application of Empirical Bayes Residuals. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research.

Chen, L., Wulczyn, F., & Huhr, S. (2022). Parental absence, early reading, and human capital formation for rural children in China. Journal of Community Psychology. doi: 10.1002/jcop.22786

Wulczyn, F., Parolini, A., & Huhr, S. (2020). Human capital and child protection: A research framework in the CRC context. Child Abuse & Neglect. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104610

Wulczyn, F., & Huhr, S. (2018). Human capital formation during childhood: Foundations of the Pathways of Care Longitudinal Study. NSW Dept. of Family and Community Services, Ashfield, NSW.

Wulczyn, F., Collins, L., Chen, L., & Huhr, S. (2017). Statistical power, selection bias, and nonresponse correction. Pathways of Care Longitudinal Study: Outcomes of Children and Young People in Out-of-Home Care. Technical Report Number 5. Sydney, NSW Department of Family and Community Services.

Wulczyn, F., Vesneski, W., Huhr, S., Monahan-Price, K., Martinez, Z., Verhulst, C., & Weiss, A. (2016). The value added impact of adoption policy on adoption rates. Global Social Welfare, 3, 97-106. doi: 10.1007/s40609-016-0058-0

Wulczyn, F., Alpert, L., Monahan-Price, K., Huhr, S., Palinkas, L. A., & Pinsoneault, L. (2015). Research evidence use in the child welfare system. Child Welfare, 94(2), 141165. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48623522

Key Work

Key Work

Project
Building Evidence on New York City’s Efforts to Provide Comprehensive Supports for Youth in Foster Care
This project examines whether New York City's Fair Futures Program is meeting its goals.
August 2, 2023
Research
Evaluation of Fair Futures Shows a Well-Developed but Still Emerging Model for Working with Young People in Foster Care
This report details the findings from an 18-month study of the implementation of the Fair Futures initiative. 
2022
Report
Intercept Program Evaluation Shows Reductions in Likelihood of Out-of-home Placement
This report describes Intercept, the Center for State Child Welfare Data’s evaluation of the program, and the extent to which the findings demonstrate an impact...
2020
Report
Developmental Perspective Important when Considering Placement Options
This report highlights the importance of understanding placement outcomes from a developmental perspective and how outcomes differ for young people depending on...
2017
Report
Use of Research Evidence Leads to Faster Permanency for Youth in Foster Care
Research evidence is information that has been generated according to scientific principles and practices. The term research evidence use – or REU – refers to...
2015
Project
The Center for State Child Welfare Data
The Center for State Child Welfare Data–or the Data Center–supports child welfare systems in more than 30 states to make evidence-based decisions designed to...
January 1, 2018