AbstractsSociology

All Unhappy Families: Standardization and Child Welfare Decision-Making.

by Emily Adlin Bosk




Institution: University of Michigan
Department: Social Work and Sociology
Degree: PhD
Year: 2015
Keywords: evidence-based practice; child welfare decision-making; structured decision-making; Social Work; Social Sciences
Record ID: 2061236
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/111625


Abstract

In the past 15 years, actuarial-based risk assessments designed to make child welfare decision-making more objective have proliferated. However, we know little about how actuarial-based decision-making plays out on the ground. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 66 Child Protective Service (CPS) workers in 2 states, this dissertation extends existing scholarship on actuarial-based risk assessments to foreground how CPS workers and child welfare agencies make meaning of decision-making in a structured environment. In three separate but related empirical papers, I investigate the intended and unintended consequences of using actuarial-based risk assessments to frame decision-making at the level of the organization, the individual, and the risk assessment itself. In the first article, I find that individual workers conceptualize and complete the risk assessment in varied ways. The amount of discretion that workers reported having was often associated with their social status characteristics, suggesting that issues of social power and privilege remained at play in a context intended to constrain their impact. The second article examines differences between a tight vs. loose implementation of the same standardized procedure, highlighting the ways in which distinct approaches to implementation changed the meaning of the intervention itself. In the third article, I look at how one risk assessment is structured. I find that an unintended focus on preventing one type of error in judgment de-emphasizes preventing others, sometimes with a devastating impact for families. Breaking away from rigid dichotomies that pit clinical and actuarial decision-making as mutually exclusive methods, I propose an integrative model that capitalizes on the strengths of both clinical and standardized processes. I argue that it is critical to understand and recognize how subjective assessments are already incorporated into processes for using standardized decision-making tools. The solution is not to find new ways to exclude caseworkers??? judgment but to offer a place for it alongside other approaches to improving case decision-making. I propose creating an integrated clinical and standardized decision-making model as well as revising current risk assessments to reflect a relational and dynamic assessment of case factors.