Decision-Making and Use of Heuristics By Practitioners Matching Children with Foster Families

Background and Purpose

A heuristic is a strategy that ignores part of the information with the goal of making decisions more quickly, frugally, and/or accurately than more complex methods. The compromised nature of matching decisions might cause practitioners to rely on heuristics instead of analytical approaches to decision-making. However, the use of heuristics in the matching decision has not been assessed. Therefore, this study explores which decision-making heuristics are used by practitioners to determine which foster family is the best fit for a child.

Methods

A number of 20 matching practitioners from the Netherlands were interviewed using vignettes and a ‘think-aloud’ methodology to generate a sophisticated understanding of their reasoning behind matching decisions. Two types of vignettes were created: hypothetical child’s cases coming into foster care and foster families ready for fostering. The interviews were analyzed using a qualitative deductive content analysis, focused on the manifest data. We examined key indicators of three classes of heuristics for the matches made by the practitioners: recognition heuristics, one-reason decision-making and trade-off heuristics.

Results

Practitioners seemed to rely more on heuristics instead of analytical approaches to decision-making. Although several matching guidelines or tools are available, none of the matchers mentioned that they would normally use them. Parts of the information were ignored by the practitioners, which helped them to make their decisions more quickly. The recognition heuristic did not play a decisive role in the matching decision process. The first mentioned family was not automatically chosen as the best family overall. Practitioners always considered more aspects of the family before making the final decision. The findings for the one-reason heuristics showed the existence of conjunctive decision-making rules; families were rejected based on one negative premise without checking their other aspects. The analysis of the trade-off heuristics showed that the outcome of the decision-making process is linked to the number of positive premises mentioned by the practitioner. However, the outcome was also linked to the family with the most mentioned premises, which might indicate confirmation bias. A confirmation bias would mean that practitioners, after deciding implicitly on one of the families, look for characteristics that validate their decision.

Conclusions and Implications

The vignettes in combination with the think-aloud approach proved valuable for gaining insight in the decision-making mechanisms of the matching decision. The results of this study support the notion that practitioners use heuristic decision-making strategies. Therefore, a quality check to the decisions should be incorporated in daily practice. This could include creating outcome feedback or learning opportunity from decisions made in the past, so the decision to use certain heuristics can be validated instead of intuitive.