Factors driving case dispositions in child welfare services
Subtitle: challenging conventional wisdom about the importance of organizations and workers.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Description: This thesis challenged the assumption that factors unrelated to the clinical concerns of the case drive case dispositions in child welfare services. It examined the relative influence of clinical characteristics and worker and organizational characteristics, to a series case dispositions made at the conclusion of a child maltreatment investigation: referral of a family member to an internal or external service, substantiation of child maltreatment, consideration of child welfare court, consideration of placement and provision of ongoing services. It also examined which organizational and worker characteristics were associated with the case dispositions examined.The study found that the clinical characteristics of the investigation (noted physical and/or emotional harm, number of child functioning issues, number of caregiver functioning issues, number of household moves in the past six months) were the factors considered to be most important for the substantiation of maltreatment, provision of ongoing services, a referral at the conclusion of the investigation, consideration of placement and consideration of child welfare court. Factors not related to the needs of the identified children and families also influenced case dispositions in certain organizational conditions. The type of worker position influenced each of the five case dispositions examined. The development of organizational measures to represent multiple theoretical perspectives is proposed.This assumption was tested by (1) an exploration of organizational theoretical literature in order to generate key constructs; (2) a review of the child welfare empirical literature and other empirical literatures; and (3) a multi-variate analysis through a series of 38 logistic regression models using a comprehensive child welfare dataset that collected information about the results of nearly 5,000 child maltreatment investigations as well a description of the characteristics of the workers and organizations responsible for conducting those investigations.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: A, page: 2384.