Making a Case for Permanency Recommendations: Bringing Scientific and Embodied Knowledge to Bear on Frontline Foster Care Casework

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

In recent years, the social work profession has rallied around science as the most effective and ethical mode of achieving professional legitimacy and social change (Gambrill, 1999; Brekke, 1986, 2012). Science promises unbiased accounts of the world and is a powerful tool for developing causal explanations for social problems, establishing causal links between interventions and outcomes, and predicting future behavior. But calls to embrace science occur alongside contradictory professional logics that ask workers to incorporate contextually-rich and embodied knowledge about clients and the social world. In frontline child welfare practice, caseworkers use both scientific tools and embodied, interpretive strategies to collect information about parents, explain what caused them to abuse or neglect their children, identify interventions, and predict maltreatment recurrence (Hardesty, 2015). This study uses ethnographic methods to examine how child welfare workers respond to simultaneous demands for scientific and interpretive accounts of clients within an institutional environment that privileges scientific discourse.  

METHODS

This analysis is part of a 15-month ethnographic study of frontline child welfare workers at a concurrent planning adoption program in the Midwest. Data include more than 1,000 hours of participant observation with nine caseworkers as they interacted with clients, coordinated care with allied service providers, attended staff meetings, and met with other members of the child welfare team to discuss case trajectories and child permanency recommendations. The author also conducted impromptu interviews with workers during participant observation. Themes identified through participant observation and in situ interviews were refined via semi-structured interviews and content analysis of child welfare worker training materials.

 RESULTS

Workers’ assessments of what caused parents to maltreat or neglect their children, their opinions on whether these causes had been adequately identified and remedied, and their predictions about whether a parent could safely and effectively rear their children in the future were informed by myriad types of information, including validated biopsychosocial assessments, expert evaluations, treatment compliance rates, parent child visitation schedule adherence, risk assessments, and workers’ own embodied experiences observing and interacting with parents. However, observations of worker interactions and permanency recommendation meetings showed workers grappling with discrepancies between what they knew about clients given these complex sources of information, and what they were officially allowed to conclude about parents based upon the child welfare institution’s hierarchy of evidence. Ultimately, these interactions revealed that institutional demands for scientifically grounded forms of evidence and explanation caused workers to reframe non-scientific information or exclude it from official assessments of parents, sometimes leading workers to make permanency recommendations with which they disagreed.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

These findings suggest that scientific approaches do not necessarily promote transparency and that child welfare ought to consider adopting a more capacious understanding of evidence. Equally important, the in-depth nature and methodological complexity of ethnography—including the ability to detect discrepancies between what workers said and did, and to observe workers making sense of evidence in real time—allowed the researcher to posit a causal link between the politics of science and the evidentiary dilemmas caseworkers faced in day-to-day practice.