Decision Making in Social Work with Families and Children: Developing Decision-Aids Compatible with Cognition: Figure 1

Improving Child Protection by Integrating Research Evidence and Clinical Experience

“…Thus it is consistent with the Structured Professional Judgment approach of (Bortoli and Dolan 2014), although differing by its estimation of a credible interval for the probability of abuse derived from the evidence. In the absence of such quantification, the use of guidelines seems not to improve the reliability of risk assessment when standardised information is provided (Skivenes and Stenberg 2013).…”

Improving decision‐making in care order proceedings: A multijurisdictional study of court decision‐makers' viewpoints

“…We have asked court decision‐makers for their perceptions about the possibilities of improving the care order proceedings. Decision‐making on complex child welfare issues has received extensive attention over the years from scholars and researchers (e.g., Munro, ; Gambrill & Shlonsky, ; Britner & Mossler, ; DePanfilis & Girvin, ; De Bortoli & Dolan, ; Berrick, Peckover, Pösö, & Skivenes, , Skivenes & Tonheim, , Burns et al, ). These studies provide an important contribution of knowledge to the field of child welfare, professional judgement, and decision‐making in general.…”

Contemporary Developments in Child Protection

“…For example, the tendency of humans to make decisions based on the most vivid or recent piece of information [128], the lack of the computational ability of humans to consider and weigh up all relevant information, the effect of "frames" (the implicit contextual parameters of decisions) satisficing-taking the best available option rather than the ideal-and the use of heuristics and biases, particularly the tendency to have a confirmation bias. Many of these dynamics can lead to an overconfidence in human judgement, particularly when people are forced to make decisions quickly, or the "latent conditions" under which they are forced to operate lead to negative decision "shapers" such as incomplete information and high uncertainty, systemic feedback errors, improper drivers (such as technical tasks rewarded, rather than family outcomes) or a lack of training [69,92,129,130]. However, slower consideration of relevant issues, combined with education about cognitive biases, can help reduce their impact [92,131].…”