SW Biases in Child Risk Assessment and Decision Making in Israel

Introduction:

Social workers are called upon to assess risk to children and recommend interventions in many contexts. Two major contexts include child removal from home and child custody. Such decisions assessments and decisions might change the children's lives, as-well-as their families'. In Israel, such assessments and recommendations are made by social workers, based upon their assessment of the child and the parents' abilities. It is hypothesized that such risk assessments and decisions are influenced not only by the objective risk to the child and parental performance, but also by other factors such as biases regarding the social worker's attitudes vis-à-vis social/cultural norms, social status of the family, and preconceived expectations.

Methods:

The paper presents an integrated sum of six studies, three dealing with risk assessment and out-of-home placement recommendations, and three dealing with custody recommendations. All six studies used an experimental design within a cross-sectional survey framework. A series of vignettes were constructed, describing a child at risk and his/her family. Each study randomly manipulated three variables, according to the study's context, including ethnicity, socioeconomic-status of family, parental education, parental communication, parental functioning, child gender, and child wishes. The samples were purposive-convenience samples, consisting of 105-130 social-workers per study (a total of about 715 social-workers), within the Jewish and the Arab sectors in Israel. In each study, workers were asked to respond to eight randomly selected vignettes. Responses for the placement studies included perceived risk to the child, and placement recommendation; for the custody studies responses included custody recommendation. Each questionnaire also asked of the workers’ socio-demographic background, professional training, and specific professional role. Regression analyses were carried at the vignette level, controlling statistically for within worker clustering using robust standard errors within a Generalized-Estimating-Equations (GEE) model.

Results:

The results indicated that social-workers risk-assessments and recommendations are significantly influenced by personal biases and traditional norms. Factors such as ethnicity of the parents, parents' socioeconomic and educational level, and parent's gender, were prominent in determining the probability of out-of-home placement and custody recommendations. Thus, children were more prone to be recommended for out-of-home placement when the parents were of minority status and of low socioeconomic level; and were more prone to be placed in maternal custody, regardless of parental functioning, child gender, and child wishes.

Conclusions and Implications:

The results are discussed within the framework of reasoned vs. heuristic decision making processes, on the one hand, and power relations between workers and clients. Assessing risk to children and making placement decisions are influenced by professionally based heuristics, which at times may bias the risk assessment and decision making process. The significant role of social status of the parents is highlighted. Thus, parental characteristics, such as gender, ethnic origin, socioeconomic status, education, as well as quality of interaction with the social worker, may bias an otherwise reasoned decision making process. Implications for social work training are discussed from the perspectives of tacit knowledge, worker's reflexivity, and evidence-based practice. We emphasize the importance of developing and assimilating relevant organizational-mechanisms, supervision, and teaching curricula.