This volume reports three related "mini-projects" building upon New York City's Child Welfare Information Services (CWIS) program, a management information system for children in care. A field trial was performed to assess the value of new data modules representing information domains which were thought to be highly useful and not normally available. The studies focused on three phenomena: (1) parents' visitation of their children in care, (2) service contacts with parents and the ability of children to establish relationships with their social workers, and (3) the children's foster homes as a potential permanent abode in the event of parental failure to resume care. An important feature of the trial runs of data modules was that they had been linked to the existing CWIS database. This link made it possible to sample from each of the 20 to 33 participating agencies' caseloads in a systematic way. Equally important, the link with the CWIS database allowed investigators to follow, over the course of a year or more, the progress of children for whom experimental forms had been filled out; such follow-up helped in determining whether measures developed from the data modules were predictive of status changes (for example, the discharge of children to their parents). (RH)