Research to Consider While Effectively Re-Designing Child Welfare Services

Abstract

An intense appetite for reforming and transforming child welfare services in the United States is yielding many new initiatives. Vulnerable children and families who become involved with child welfare clearly deserve higher quality and more effective services. New policies, programs, and practices should be built on sound evidence. Reforms based on misunderstandings about what the current data show may ultimately harm families. This review highlights 10 commonly held misconceptions which we assert are inconsistent with the best available contemporary evidence. Implications for better alignment of evidence and reform are discussed.

Research to Consider while Effectively Re-Designing Child Welfare Services: A Response to Commentaries

“…Wald reminds us that efforts to reduce family poverty in the U.S. could have a substantial impact on child neglect and he highlights a number of studies that point to this important effect. We enthusiastically agree and as he notes, we also made this point with substantial emphasis in our recent commentary (Barth et al, 2021), as well as in a prior paper (Barth, et al, 2020). Two of our co-authors also advance these ideas in a book chapter on poverty and child maltreatment (Drake et al, 2022).…”

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Barth et al (2021) published an article in this journal identifying ten topics in the field of child welfare that are frequently discussed among professionals, advocates, and researchers in an effort to shape discussions of practice and policy reform. Concerned that these discussions are often poorly informed by the research evidence, Barth et al intended to offer a corrective to these common, erroneous narratives.

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Ensuring Authentic Representation and Collaboration Along with Research to Re-Design Child Welfare

“…Findings may differ because of issues with samples, variables, methods, geography, biases, and interpretation of the data. These problem can be addressed by drawing on information from multiple sources" (Barth et al, 2021, p. 2), their acknowledgment and conclusion are inadequate. We will not patronizingly detail how the paper minimizes the limitations and challenges of research.…”

What Counts as Evidence in Child Welfare Research?

“…While never promising a more balanced standpoint about the complex and historically troublesome 90-year history of child welfare policies and practices in the United States, it is unfortunate that Barth, Berrick, Garcia, Drake, Jonson-Reid, Gyourko, and Greeson (2021) dismiss all views other than their own to reform the government’s role in assuring the collective well-being of our children, families, and communities. The authors repeatedly affirm that a “healthy mixture of ideas” from “a wide array of stakeholders” should be represented in any examination of the child welfare system (CWS), but they in fact are clearly disinterested in any free-exchange of ideas unless it represents two premises: that Western-based and defined empirical, scientific “evidence” is the best and only valid research and that any critique of this form of empirical child welfare research is “reactive,” “flawed,” “ill-conceived,” “misguided,” “dated,” “not well anchored,” and without any legitimate merit.…”