Teaching and Learning Decision-Making in Child Welfare and Protection Social Work

This chapter begins with reflections on the author’s own “journey into risk and decision-making” during 10 years of practice and 25 years teaching social workers on this topic. Challenges in teaching and learning the knowledge and skills required for professional judgment in child welfare and protection are considered in terms of models of decision-making and models of cognitive learning processes. This is illustrated with aspects of teaching about decision-making on qualifying and post-qualifying social work courses in Northern Ireland, such as relating understandings of professional judgment and decision-making processes to assessment and care planning practice; legal aspects of making reasonable, reasoned decisions; understanding the value of and challenges in using statistical data on risk factors within decision-making; using models of professional judgment to reflect on practice; ensuring role clarity; and developing skills in engaging other professionals in decision processes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions in learning and teaching about professional judgment in child welfare and protection, including (1) the science of decision-making (including use of risk factors), (2) the art of decision-making (including understanding judgment processes using psychosocial rationality concepts), (3) evidencing what works in terms of teaching decision-making, and (4) building a knowledge base to inform teaching.

Exploring Alternate Explanations for Agency-Level Effects in Placement Decisions Regarding Aboriginal Children

This chapter summarizes a series of published papers that used data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS) to explore the influence of case and organizational characteristics on decisions to place Aboriginal children in out-of-home placements. The premise of the analyses was that these influences were consistent with the framework of the Decision-Making Ecology. In Canada, Aboriginal children are overrepresented at all points of child welfare decision-making: investigation, substantiation, and placement in out-of-home care. Case factors accounting for the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children at all service points in the child welfare system include poverty, poor housing, and substance misuse, and these factors, when coupled with inequitable resources for First Nations children residing on reserves, result in the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in the Canadian child welfare system. For this study, the authors examine case characteristics and organizational factors in a multilevel context, hypothesizing that children are more likely to be placed out of home in agencies that serve a relatively high proportion of Aboriginal children. According to the statistical models presented, the most important of these factors is whether the provincial government operates the child welfare agency. As with the proportion of Aboriginal children on the caseload, the risk of a child being placed is greater in government-run agencies compared to agencies operated by private funders. Further analysis needs to be conducted to fully understand individual- and organizational-level variables that may influence /decisions regarding placement of Aboriginal children.

The Impact of Drugs, Infants, Single Mothers, and Relatives on Reunification

Using a Decision-Making Ecology (DME) approach and proportional hazards models, the study reviewed in this chapter isolated four case factor profiles that interacted strongly with race and resulted in disparate reunification outcomes for African American children compared with Anglos. The four interrelated factors were drug involvement, a solo infant case, single mothers, and relative placements. A cohort of 21,763 children from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services who were placed for the first time in care, who were under 13, and were either Anglo or African American were followed for 20 months or more post entry into care. Starting with an initial model consisting of main effects only and consistent with other studies, African American children had a 12% lower hazard rate of reunification compared to Anglo children. However, when a set of case profiles involving combinations of single parents, single infants, drug involvements, and kinship placements were crossed with race, the magnitude of the effect of race on hazard rates fanned out from no difference to as much as 68% that of Anglo children. The results show that racial disparities in outcomes resulting from complex, contextual decision-making cannot be modeled well with simple main effects models.

Instrumentation to Understand the Child Protective Services Decision-Making Processes

When children come to the attention of the child welfare system, they become involved in a decision-making process in which decisions are made that have a significant effect on their future and well-being. The decision to remove children from their families is particularly complex, yet surprisingly little is understood about this decision-making process. As a result, instrumentation has been developed and adapted over the past 20 years to further understand variations in child welfare outcomes that are decision-based and, in particular concerning the removal decision, in order to provide a more thorough understanding of the intersecting factors that influence caseworker decisions. This chapter presents research and the development and use of this instrument, drawing from the decision-making ecology as the underlying rationale for obtaining the measures. The instrument was based on the development of decision-making scales used in multiple studies and administered to child protection caseworkers in several states. This effort is part of a larger program of research that seeks to better understand decision-making processes in child welfare systems in order to promote fairness, accuracy, and improved outcomes among children and families.

Frameworks and Models in Decision-Making and Judgment in Child Welfare and Protection

This chapter presents the basic concepts, theoretical perspectives, and areas of scholarship that bear on decisions in child welfare—making choices in decision environments characterized by high levels of uncertainty. The authors distinguish between normative models that predict what decision-makers ought to choose when faced with alternatives and descriptive models that describe how they tend to make these choices in real life. The chapter reviews those challenges that may be especially relevant in the complex context of child welfare and protection. One way in which decision-makers overcome task complexities and limitations in human information processing (bounded rationality) is by using heuristics to navigate complex tasks. The chapter reviews strategies to correct some limitations in judgment. The authors examine the relationships between workers’ predictions of what would be the outcomes of the case and the actual outcomes and describe two types of error (false positive and false negative) and the related concepts of specificity and sensitivity. These issues are followed by a description of the Lens Model and some of its implications for child welfare decision-making, including predictive risk modeling and studies on information processing models. The final section presents current theoretical models in child welfare decision-making and describes Decision-Making Ecology (DME) and Judgments and Decision Processes in Context (JUDPiC). The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research on child welfare decision-making that could contribute to our conceptual understanding and have practical utility as well.

The Decision-Making Ecology of Placing a Child into Foster Care

The Decision-Making Ecology provided a framework for empirically testing the impact of case, caseworker, and organizational factors on the decision to place children in out-of-home care. The structural equation model developed fit the data extremely well, indicating a complex relationship between the variables. The main findings indicate that case factors, even as aggregated to the worker level, were of most importance: Percent removed was increased in part by greater average risk being assessed and more families on a worker’s caseload being low income. Furthermore, removal rates were increased by lower proportions of Hispanic families on the caseload, as well as by lower organizational support and a perception of manageable workload and sufficient resources. Individual factors (i.e., variables characterizing the caseworkers themselves) were not found to directly influence the placement decision, including workers’ own race/ethnicity, although various orders of mediated effects were indicated, and these are detailed. Interrelationships between variables that affect case, caseworker, and organizational factors are discussed along with implications for practice.

Lessons Learned from International Studies on Child Protection Decision-Making Employing the Model of Judgments and Decisions Processes in Context (JUDPiC)

The study of intercountry variability of child protection decision-making has become an emerging research theme in the past decade. This chapter draws on a variety of studies conducted using the model of Judgments and Decisions Processes in Context (JUDPiC) to compare judgments and decisions in cases of alleged maltreatment made by decision-makers in five countries: Israel, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. The chapter begins with a brief overview of research on intercountry comparisons in the field of child protection decision-making, then describes the JUDPiC model and presents in some detail the first international comparison study conducted with this underlying model. The authors offer next the subsequent developments of this research project in the different countries involved. In the final section, they discuss some implications for child protection policy and practice and future research.

Empirical Methods for Studying Decision-Making in Child Welfare and Protection

Studying the complex nature of decision-making in child welfare and protection is challenging. Researcher in this field uses various empirical methods, each with its advantages and limitation. This chapter describes the current state of the art of the most prominent empirical methods used to study this subject and to identify empirical methods from other fields, with the potential to advance decision-making research in child protection. The authors briefly describe methods for decision-making research, give examples of how these methods were used, and critically assess their strengths and limitations. “Black-box” input-output analysis is reviewed, and the authors describe the use of case files and administrative data, agency surveys, and experimental designs with simulated cases. The chapter then describes methods to trace decision processes based on verbalization (think-aloud), behavior (tracing information acquisition), and people’s sense-making in everyday contexts (ethnographic observations). The review ends with recommendations of future directions for research on decision-making in child protection.

The Decision to Substantiate Allegations of Child Maltreatment

In the United States, the Child Protective Services system is responsible for investigating and responding to allegations of child abuse and neglect. At the conclusion of an investigation, caseworkers are expected to decide whether allegations are “substantiated” (demonstrated to be true) or not. How that decision is made—and whether it reflects an objective assessment of the evidence available—is widely debated. This chapter first presents an overview of the decision-making process and the implications of decision-making for vulnerable children and families. Next, it describes how rates of substantiation vary across and within states. The authors then present data from a nationally representative study of child protective services investigations on the factors associated with the decision to substantiate child maltreatment. They find that agency characteristics are predictive of substantiation, net of child and family characteristics. Overall, the authors conclude that substantiation is unlikely to be a valid indicator of the incidence of child maltreatment, and they discuss possible strategies for improving the consistency and utility of the substantiation decision.

The Use and Usability of Decision-Making Theory in Child Welfare Policy and Practice

The aim of this chapter is to clarify how decision-making processes within the context of child welfare and child protection could be improved by decision-making theories (i.e., Decision-Making Ecology [DME] and decisional conflict model), with specific interest in methods intended to support practitioners based on these theories, in particular methods of structured decision-making and actuarial methods. Existing studies indicate that structured decision-making methods have a limited effect on the decision-making process, as well as on the reliability and validity of the judgments and choices made by professionals in cases of suspected child abuse and neglect. Actuarial methods may be more precise in making valid judgments but may ignore factors relevant to decisions concerning treatment and intervention. The DME framework reveals that other factors—in addition to rationally weighing information and arguing—influence the decision-making process and outcomes. Especially the influence of decision-maker factors seems to be ignored in structured decision-making methods. Although systematic methods and instruments do have some value, several additional options are available that take decision-maker factors more into account. This chapter discusses the potentials of critical thinking, team decision-making, systematic feedback, and shared decision-making.