The decision of out-of-home placement in residential care after parental neglect: Empirically testing a psychosocial model

Abstract

Out-of-home placement decisions in residential care are complex, ambiguous and full of uncertainty, especially in cases of parental neglect. Literature on this topic is so far unable to understand and demonstrate the source of errors involved in those decisions and still fails to focus on professional's decision making process. Therefore, this work intends to test a socio-psychological model of decision-making that is a more integrated, dualistic and ecological version of the Theory of Planned Behavior's model. It describes the process through which the decision maker takes into account personal, contextual and social factors of the Decision-Making Ecology in the definition of his/her decision threshold. One hundred and ninety-five professionals from different Children and Youth Protection Units, throughout the Portuguese territory, participated in this online study. After reading a vignette of a (psychological and physical) neglect case toward a one-year-old child, participants were presented with a group of questions that measured worker's assessment of risk, intention, attitude, subjective norm, behavior control and beliefs toward residential care placement decision, as well as worker's behavior experience, emotions and family/child-related-values involved in that decision. A set of structural equation modeling analyses have proven the good fit of the proposed model. The intention to propose a residential care placement decision was determined by cognitive, social, affective, value-laden and experience variables and the perceived risk. Altogether our model explained 61% of professional's decision toward a parental neglect case. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed, namely the importance of raising awareness about the existence of these biased psychosocial determinants.

Defining Child Maltreatment Among Lay People and Community Professionals: Exploring Consensus in Ratings of Severity

“…The decision to report a 690 case of parental maltreatment has been characterized as 691 complex, ambiguous and full of errors and uncertainty. 692 That is even more the case for instances of parental neglect 693 in which, although the long-term effects may be detri-694 mental (DePanfilis 2006), the physical proofs are hard to 695 obtain (Dickens 2007;Rodrigues et al 2015). Under-696 standing the decision of reporting neglect cases is partic-697 ularly pertinent in Portugal, where the concept is absent in 698 the law and institutionally undervalued in comparison with 699 other forms of maltreatment like physical or sexual abuse 700 (Torres et al 2008).…”

“…According to the World Health Organization (2014), inter-41 national estimates on the occurrence and prevalence of child 42 maltreatment in a family context vary, among other factors, 43 according to the definitions of abuse and neglect employed, 44 which play a central role in decision-making on referrals and 45 the remaining assessment process (Arruabarrena and De 46 Paúl 2012;Rodrigues et al 2015). For this reason, in recent 47 decades, a number of different studies have been done on the 48 definition of maltreatment (e.g., Calheiros 2006;English 49 et al 2005), with its type (i.e., classification into types and 50 subtypes) and severity being the most commonly studied 51 aspects (Herrenkohl 2005;Litrownik et al 2005).…”

Child Maltreatment Severity Questionnaire (MSQ) for Professionals: Development, Validity, and Reliability Evidence

“…That is why in many countries the protection practices have been criticized for their unsystematic assessment, leading to inconsistent service delivery and insufficient case planning and decision making (e.g., Benbenishty et al, 2015). Among the several distinct factors that have been identified as related to biased evaluations and decision processes, the nature of maltreatment (e.g., type, pattern, risk of harm, severity), the lack of professional training and guidelines of what constitutes maltreatment, and individual evaluator characteristics (e.g., profession, experience, skills, values, comfort with casework, orientation to protection of the child vs. preservation of family; e.g., Benbenishty et al, 2015;Rodrigues, Calheiros, & Pereira, 2015) have important implications on professionals' decision making processes regarding child protection social and legal measures.…”

Conceptualizing Culturally Infused Engagement and Its Measurement for Ethnic Minority and Immigrant Children and Families

“…Similarly, vignettes may be used productively to test aspects of the culturally infused engagement model that posit connections between different beliefs that precede help seeking, such as ideas about the cause of illness or distress, about the illness identity, and about the meaning of the illness to the self. The single existing study that tested the TPB with a vignette approach examined multiple factors associated with welfare workers' decisions about whether to place a child in residential care or to keep the child with the family (Rodrigues et al 2015). The results of that study were able to unmask factors that may bias decisions about parental neglect.…”