"out of Luck": How Service Accessibility Impacts Child Welfare Decision-Making

Background: A large body of research has demonstrated that child welfare decision-making is influenced by a range of factors outside of case characteristics. This variation makes child welfare outcomes as dependent on which worker a family receives as any other case-level factor, challenging basic notions of fairness. Specifically, extant quantitative research finds associations between caseworkers’ characteristics, such as their years of experience, caseload, and level of training, and their case actions (e.g., LeBlanc et al., 2012; Lwin et al., 2024). Other studies attribute variations in decision-making to caseworkers’ implicit bias (e.g., Dettlaff et al., 2011), which acts as one mechanism by which racial disparities arise in the child welfare system. Improving the consistency and accuracy of decision-making is key to improving equity and case outcomes. While individual worker characteristics are an important source of variation in decision-making, there has been very little research that has explored how structural factors may influence when and why a case is closed, escalated, or re-referred while children remain in the home. It is important to examine how systemic barriers constrain the options available to both workers and families, before attributing errors or disparities in decision-making or outcomes solely to individual caseworker factors.

Methods: This study is part of a large-scale randomized control trial of providing economic support to child welfare involved families. Our findings emerged inductively from focus groups (N=9) with child welfare workers who were working in intact family services. The focus groups were conducted across rural, suburban, and urban settings, with four to twelve workers or supervisors in each group, (total participants =64). Participants were asked how poverty impacted the families on their caseload. This work was hypothesis-generating in nature, intended to surface unidentified phenomena related to poverty and child welfare decision-making. We used a flexible coding process to conduct a content analysis of the data.

Results: We identified systemic barriers caseworkers regularly encountered that impacted their ability to meet family's needs. Primarily, caseworkers reported a disconnect between service availability and access, describing instances where critical services existed but were difficult or impossible to access due to arbitrary restrictions. For example, while one county had a crisis nursery, an arbitrary age cut-off may leave children in need ineligible. Others noted that the waitlist for affordable housing could close without notice, leaving families “basically out of luck.” Although services were in place, neither caseworkers nor parents had control over their availability, prolonging families’ involvement in the child welfare system and altering workers’ decision-making.

Discussion: Our findings emphasize the need for policy consideration of service accessibility, even when essential services are technically in place. Barriers such as arbitrary eligibility criteria and unpredictable waitlists are crucial to reducing prolonged child welfare involvement. The findings underscore the importance of maintaining a full spectrum of services that meet diverse family needs across all ages and entry points. The intersection between service availability and caseworker decision-making may be an important overlooked variable in child welfare outcomes.