Towards a comprehensive view of factors affecting decision-making and judgments in child protection

Making decisions is the core task of practitioners working in child protection services. It may be also the most difficult and the riskiest. Wrong decisions can damage children and families irreparably. Moreover, they may also... [ view full abstract ]

Making decisions is the core task of practitioners working in child protection services. It may be also the most difficult and the riskiest. Wrong decisions can damage children and families irreparably. Moreover, they may also evoke negative consequences for the decision-makers themselves.
Researchers in our field have tried to answer a tough question: where do wrong decisions come from? Frequently, wrong decisions in child protection cases can be traced to the way they were made: the information available was insufficient or ambiguous, the alternatives were not well defined, the costs of the decision were not adequately estimated…
Researchers have also pointed to the mind of the decision-maker as the cause of wrong decisions. Research conducted in the lab and the field has shown how decision-makers use unconscious routines to deal with the complexity of decisions. This is what we call heuristics, a series of psychological traps of our thinking that can undermine our decisions. Unfortunately, the individual awareness of the effects of these irrational anomalies has not improved the quality of decisions at the organizational level. More complex steps are needed to counteract these biases, as decision making is not an event that takes place in solitude at a single point in time. Decision making in child protection is a process that unfolds over months or years. It is replete with personal nuances and organizational history, and determined by the policy and the social context in which the decisions are made.
Traditionally, we have considered decision-making as an individual action, a prerogative of the decision-maker. Both the information used and the logic behind the decisions have been left up to them. The decision-maker has frequently been depicted as a black box: the information goes in and decisions come out, and what happens in between is a mystery. Moreover, unlike other fields, decision-making in child protection has rarely been the focus of systematic analysis within our child protection services and organizations.
The field of decision-making in child protection has made important conceptual advances during the last decade. Firstly, we have begun to define decision-making as a temporal process that includes several decision points which are part of the system of child protection, each point has a different decision-making context. Secondly, we have become more interested in how multiple nested contexts affect decision-making behaviour at the individual case level.
In this plenary session we intend to unpack the decision-making black box by using a comprehensive approach. We will present the latest research that articulates and explains how context and decision-maker behaviours affect decision-making in child protection, and how such knowledge might lead to improvements in decision-making for children and families.