Street-Level Disparities: A Qualitative Examination of How Place Shapes the Use of Discretion in Frontline Child Welfare Investigations

Each year, about 4 million U.S. children are the subjects of maltreatment investigations carried out by state and local child welfare agencies (U.S. DHHS, 2022). Like other street-level bureaucrats, the caseworkers who carry out these investigations are governed by and responsible for implementing a complex array of federal, state, and local policies and they wield significant discretion (Hagedorn, 1995; Lipsky, 2010). Some scholars have argued that discretionary decision-making about when to “substantiate” an investigation results in notorious disparities by race and income across the child welfare system (e.g., Dettlaff et al., 2011; Rivaux et al., 2008; Smith & Donovan, 2003). Yet, limited research has taken a street-level approach to assess these known disparities in child welfare, hindering the capacity of policy and practice reform efforts in this system.

This study takes a novel street-level approach to examine child welfare system disparities, employing a comparative case study method to explore decision-making by street-level investigators and their supervisors in a public child welfare agency. In this study, I placed particular emphasis on how place influences frontline decisions and the equity implications of this interplay between place and discretionary decisions. To explore this interplay, I analyze data from 24 interviews conducted across four offices in a Midwestern State. The offices were purposively sampled across urban, suburban, and rural regions, with interviews conducted in one large urban office, two mixed suburban offices (primarily suburban with some pockets of urban areas and outlying rural areas), and one solely rural office. This purposive sampling was done with the goal of understanding how place-based demographics and characteristics, including racial and income composition and regional resource availability, may shape discretionary decisions made by street-level public child welfare workers.

Results indicate that geographic variations in agency settings directly influence the administrative challenges and racial and economic disparities which frontline workers face, and workers use discretion to respond to these unique contexts. To illustrate, in the rural office, the surrounding communities were primarily white and high poverty, and despite caseworkers having classist perspectives which drove their interactions with families, workers’ capacity to act on such perspectives was constrained by the setting in which they worked. Investigators had difficulty pushing for out of home placement due to both a lack of foster homes and due to conservative judges in the regions. On the other hand, workers in the urban office - whose clients were primarily Black, Latinx, and low-income, operated in a less administratively constrained environment with more resources and thereby more possibilities for both “good” and “bad” outcomes. These possibilities drove some workers to make harsher decisions with families, including pushing more for out of home placements, while they drove others to use their discretion to seek out as many resources as possible to keep children with their parents.

The findings across urban, suburban, and rural offices offer important implications for policy reform efforts in the child welfare system, highlighting the need for tailored interventions by place in order to effectively address equity concerns in child welfare outcomes.