The continuing role of material factors in child maltreatment and placement

Pelton, Leroy H.

doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.08.001

Cited by 300 publications

(214 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…While disproportionality in the child welfare system is currently understood to be a complex issue with multiple causes (Putnam-Hornstein et al 2013, Pelton, 2015, Font et al 2015, child welfare research in the 1990s framed the persistent overrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities as partly a result of decisionmaker bias in which "race, rather than risk, was the relevant factor" (Putnam-Hornstein et al 2013: 34). Decreasing cognitive errors in decision-making that rested on the heuristic errors and implicit biases of the child welfare worker therefore, represented an important policy corrective to race-based differential treatment (Gambrill and Shlonsky 2000).…”

Section: Structuring Child Welfare Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standardizing Biases: Selection Devices and the Quantification of Race

Hirschman¹,

Bosk²

2017

Preprint

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Abstract:Racial inequality persists despite major advances in formal, legal equality. Scholars and policymakers argue that individual biases (both explicit and implicit) combine with subjective organizational decision-making practices to perpetuate racial inequality. The standardization of decision-making offers a potential solution, promising to eliminate the subjectivity that biases consequential decisions. We ask, under what conditions may standardization reduce racial inequality? Drawing on research in science studies and law and society, we argue that standardization must be understood as a heterogeneous practice capable of producing very different outcomes depending on the details of the standard and the organizational infrastructure surrounding its use. We compare "selection devices" -simple quantified tools for making allocation decisions -in undergraduate admissions and child welfare to highlight the complex relationships between race and standardization. Child welfare agencies adopted a colorblind actuarial device that attempted to predict which children were most at risk, and then make decisions based on those predictions. In contrast, the University of Michigan's points system explicitly considered and valued race, with the goal of increasing minority student enrollments in the context of promoting student body diversity. Comparing these cases demonstrates how actuarial standardization practices, including those adopted with the intention of reducing racial inequality, tend to reinforce an unequal status quo by ideologically reconfiguring mutable social structures into immutable individual risk factors. In contrast, non-actuarial practices that explicitly promote racial equality are vulnerable to political challenges, as they violate norms of colorblindness and cannot be defended in terms of their predictive validity.Acknowledgements:

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Section: Structuring Child Welfare Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standardizing Biases: Selection Devices and the Quantification of Race

Hirschman¹,

Bosk²

2017

Preprint

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“…24 Limited economic resources, or a decline therein, may directly increase a family's likelihood of engaging in maltreatment by preventing the ability to fully meet a child's basic material needs. [25][26][27] A chronic lack of resources may indirectly increase the probability of maltreatment through its association with increased parental stress and depression. 28,29 Economic instability may have particularly important effects; a sudden decline in resources (negative shock) may lead to a concomitant increase in parental stress and a deterioration of the home environment beyond that associated with limited but stable economic resources.…”

Section: What This Study Addsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Home Foreclosure and Child Protective Services Involvement

et al. 2015

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We estimated associations between experiencing a home foreclosure filing and experiencing a child protective services (CPS) investigation or substantiation. METHODS:We linked a large sample drawn from administrative data on foreclosure filings, CPS involvement, and participation in a host of other public programs for .60 000 Wisconsin households over a 4-year period from 2008 to 2011. Our empirical analyses used piecewise exponential survival models to estimate the risk of CPS involvement (investigation or substantiation) as a function of a home foreclosure filing and a set of individual and household characteristics. We fitted these models with and without the inclusion of propensity score weights. RESULTS:Households that experienced a foreclosure filing had a much higher probability of CPS involvement. This was true in the year before the filing as well as the year after the foreclosure filing. However, these associations were generally largest in the period before or shortly afterward.CONCLUSIONS: Experiencing a foreclosure filing is associated with increased CPS involvement. However, it is not clear that this association is driven by the foreclosure filing action itself. Rather, increased risk of CPS involvement is apparent during the process of moving toward the filing as well as the year or so after the filing, both of which are likely characterized by limited economic resources as well as by financial and other stress.

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“…The structural perspective is conceived of as pressures on families that are often linked to relative poverty or either at a point in time or over time. Such pressures reflect a range of inequitably distributed economic and associated factors, such as low family income, parental unemployment, parental educational level, housing quality and insecurity, food and energy choice and insecurity, parental and child health and disability (Pelton, 2015). These factors are seen as either having a direct material impact on the capacity of families to offer children a good developmental experience or as indirectly causing stresses that affect parents' ability to function effectively.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The personal and emotional impact of material hardship and inequality, such as feelings of shame or anger, are also part of the mix (Cancian et al, 2013;Featherstone et al, 2014;McDonnell et al, 2015). Structural change and community programmes are central to the proposed solutions (McDonnell et al, 2015;Pelton, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: Explaining the ‘inverse intervention law’

Bywaters

Brady

Sparks

et al. 2015

Children and Youth Services Review

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Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding.Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary divide between bias and risk (or need).Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the 'inverse intervention law', is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services.

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The continuing role of material factors in child maltreatment and placement

Cited by 300 publications

References 30 publications

Standardizing Biases: Selection Devices and the Quantification of Race

Standardizing Biases: Selection Devices and the Quantification of Race

Home Foreclosure and Child Protective Services Involvement

Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: Explaining the ‘inverse intervention law’

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