Session: Working at the Methodological Intersections: Linking Methods and Theory from Social Work and the Computational Sciences to Advance Knowledge of Services and Outcomes in Foster Care (Society for Social Work and Research 27th Annual Conference - Social Work Science and Complex Problems: Battling Inequities + Building Solutions)

The American foster care system is a complex social system. Individual decision making, organizational policy, structural biases, and government regulations all interweave to produce significant disparities for foster youth relative to those outside the system, and for specific subsets of foster youth within the system. However, the foster care system is increasingly a complex sociotechnical system as well, with emerging computing technologies inserted at all levels of care. It is imperative that social work scholars and those responsible for these computing technologies work together to better understand the problems and opportunities with these methods in the contexts of the permanency, safety, and well-being of American foster youth.

This symposium showcases a set of recent works that demonstrate distinct, yet complementary approaches to studying how decisions are made in the foster care system. This symposium is unique in that it illustrates a cooperative, transdisciplinary approach to the merging of computer science and social work. Within these papers, we leverage methods originating in human factors engineering, computational social science, social work science, statistics, computer science, and sociology, turning them towards a better understanding of the complex sociotechnical system of American foster care and the critical outcomes of foster youth. The aims of this symposium, jointly organized by scholars and practitioners in social work, computer science, and human factors engineering, include:

1. To illustrate how methods from disciplines not traditionally leveraged in social work can be used in tandem to assess and address racial equity and social justice in child welfare;

2. To demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods, and between theory, method, and practice;

3. To underscore that these methods are not only new and interesting, but also bring new insights into old problems.

4. To discuss the concerns with using computational science methods in human service systems and offer considerations for their ethical and limited (?) use.

The collection of approaches and problems in this symposium demonstrate how branching out methodologically can help explain current patterns of marginalization, and suggest new paths forward towards social justice.