Child welfare professionals are entrusted, both morally and legally, with acting in children’s best interests, and regularly make crucial decisions that have a significant impact on children and their families. Such... [ view full abstract ]
Child welfare professionals are entrusted, both morally and legally, with acting in children’s best interests, and regularly make crucial decisions that have a significant impact on children and their families. Such decisions include whether to remove an allegedly maltreated child from home, keep the child at home even though there are concerns for his or her welfare, or reunify a foster child with their biological family. Such decisions may influence both positively and negatively short and long term outcomes for children and their families. In most cases, these judgments and decisions are made under circumstances of uncertainty and are prone to error, due to the fallibility of human judgment processes.
One way to improve decisions is to explicate the underlying processes and open them to public and professional scrutiny. By describing how child welfare practitioners make judgments and decisions it would be possible to identify factors that may unduly influence their decision process, as well as factors that they should attend to, but tend to ignore.
This presentation will focus on the Judgments and Decision Processes in Context (JUDPiC) model, as it applies to judgments and decisions in cases of alleged child maltreatment. According to this model, professionals make their judgments (e.g., case substantiation and risk assessments) based on case information on the child (e.g., physical signs of alleged abuse) and the family (e.g., parents’ explanations of these signs). The information on these case characteristics are processed by professionals embedded in social agencies who are influenced by their personal characteristics (e.g., their personal experiences of abuse and their attitudes toward child removal) and their agency features (e.g., placement policies and guidelines). These judgments (i.e., whether maltreatment has been substantiated, risk for future harm) lead to intervention decisions. The link between judgment and decisions is moderated by a large number of factors, such as policies as to what threshold warrants child placements, available knowledge and evidence that connect between case characteristics and appropriate interventions, and values and attitudes as to the relative merits of protecting the child and maintaining the family unit.
Finally, the whole judgment and decision process is embedded within wider and nested contexts, such as the ecological context of the family, the organizational context of the decision making agency and higher level contexts relating to the overall characteristics of the service system and the multiple cultural contexts (e.g., the public attitudes toward the protective system or national child welfare legislation).
I will present some data derived from an international study to illustrate some of the ideas. I will also address some of the limitations of the model and will suggest how it could be expanded. In my presentation, I will emphasize the role of context in child welfare decisions. I will discuss the potential implications of context-dependency on our dreams to develop universal decision making protocols, on our research agenda, and on the need to develop local monitoring systems to help guide our judgments and decisions
