Child Welfare Decision Making in Context Part 2 - How do they decide? Rationales provided for placement decisions by Dutch professionals and students
Cora Bartelink
Netherlands Youth Institute
Cora Bartelink is a researcher and advisor at Netherlands Youth Institute. The Netherlands Youth Institute is the Dutch national institute for compiling, verifying and disseminating knowledge on children and youth matters. Its main aim is to improve the development of children and young people by increasing the quality and effectiveness of the services rendered to them and their parents.
Cora is developing guidelines for professionals working in child welfare and child protection. Subjects of these guidelines are “Out-of-home placement”, “Out-of-home placement in crisis situations”, and “Deciding together with parents and children on appropriate help”. She also conducts research on decision-making on child maltreatment. Research methods include vignette study on reliability of decisions, retrospective case file study on transparency of decisions, and prospective validity study on risk assessment.
Abstract
Objectives: Out-of-home placement is a major occurrence in a child’s life. It can have both positive and negative effects on a child’s development and should therefore always be based on careful decision making.... [ view full abstract ]
Objectives: Out-of-home placement is a major occurrence in a child’s life. It can have both positive and negative effects on a child’s development and should therefore always be based on careful decision making. Repeatedly, researchers show that professionals make different placement decisions. Work experience and attitude seem to influence the decisions. We investigated the decisions of professionals and students more in depth by studying the rationales for their placement decisions. We are interested in the characteristics of these rationales and their influence on decision-making. Further, we studied the impact of welfare attitudes and work experience on rationales and decisions.
Method: A sample of 595 professionals and students was presented with a vignette of alleged child maltreatment. They were asked to determine whether maltreatment was substantiated, to assess risk, and to recommend whether or not to place the child into out-of-home care. Subsequently, participants provided rationales for their recommendation. Rationales were coded to be able to study them quantitatively.
Results: Participants mentioned a broad range of arguments to support their intervention recommendation. About half of the participants mentioned an argument that had to do with the parenting situation (i.e. parenting skills, parent-child relationship, physical injury, neglect, emotional maltreatment, or safety in the family) and about a quarter mentioned the child’s current and future development. No differences were found between students and professionals. Attitudes seemed to influence the rationales.
Conclusions: The content of the rationales was limited; participants did not provide sophisticated rationales and did not mention important aspects of the vignette. Professional training is recommended to help child protection workers to reach more explicit reasoning, i.e. “critical thinking”. Workers need to be more clear about the conclusions they draw, and especially how they make a case for their decisions.
Authors
-
Cora Bartelink
(Netherlands Youth Institute)
-
Erik J. Knorth
(University of Groningen)
-
A. Carien Koopmans
(Politie)
-
Mónica López López
(University of Groningen)
-
Cilia Witteman
(Radboud University Nijmegen)
-
Ingrid ten Berge
(Wiliam Schrikker Groep)
-
Tom van Yperen
(Netherlands Youth Institute)
Topic Area
Child Protection Systems and Strategies at local, national and international levels
Session
Symposia13 » Session 1-Child Protection Systems (11:00 - Tuesday, 3rd October, Europe 2 Room)
Presentation Files
The presenter has not uploaded any presentation files.
