Judgments and decisions made by child welfare professionals have a crucial role in child protection because of the major impact they have on the lives of children and young people at risk and their families. There is evidence that judgments and decisions made by professionals are influenced by expected attitudes on the context of their child welfare system (Davidson-Arad & Benbenishty, 2010; Martin, Peters, & Glisson, 1998). Therefore, decisions about the most effective interventions cannot be completely derived from global professional theory and practice, since they need to vary based on the local context (Benbenishty, Osmo, & Gold, 2003; Benbenishty et al., 2015). Given these circumstances, it is important to examine how professionals in different country contexts and with different attitudes make these important judgments and decisions.
This study focuses on child protection’s professionals in Portugal and examines how their attitudes are associated with their judgments and decisions related to foster care placement and family reunification in face of a case vignette of child maltreatment.
The vignette describes in detail the case of an alleged maltreated child (Diana). This case was presented randomly to the participants in one of four versions (2×2): crossing, in the first part, the mother’s wish toward removal (against or not) and, in the second part, the child’s wish regarding reunification (against or not). The sample was constituted by 200 professionals of the main Portuguese regions, (50 per each version) that work directly or indirectly with children at risk. Therefore, we used the approach proposed by Benbenishty et al. (2015), through which we assessed decisions, whether to place the child in foster care and whether to reunify her with the biological family, on the basis of a series of judgments (e.g. substantiation of alleged abuse and neglect, risk assessments), that were influenced by the characteristics of the case, the decision making context, and mother’s and child’s wishes. We also used the "Child Welfare Attitudes Questionnaire” in order to measure what the professionals thought, in general, about foster care promoting children's development and well-being; residential care promoting children's development and well-being; reunification; children’s participation in decisions; and parents’ participation in decisions.
Apart from the general concordance at the level of the risk, more than half of the practitioners thought the child should be removed from home. With regard to reunification decision, we found that only about 8% thought the child should be reunified with her family, after being in successful placement for two years.
We conclude that there were different approaches to the case based on different professionals’ attitudes that can be classified in two groups: one more pro-removal and other anti-removal. These groups presented somehow different risk assessments and intervention recommendations, and their decisions where significantly influenced by the mother’s and child’s attitudes. Furthermore, we have done comparisons with studies made in other countries, concluding that the country context can be an important factor that leads to different outcomes. Our findings indicate that the Portuguese professionals tend to be more pro removal compared to the other countries, nevertheless quite similarly to Spain. Implications for both practice and research are presented.
Assessment and decision making in child welfare , Participation of children and families in child welfare interventions
