Reducing Child Protection Error in Social Work: Towards a Holistic-Rational Perspective

Social work in the UK remains embroiled in concerns about child protection error. The serious injury or death of vulnerable children continues to evince much consternation in the public and private spheres. Governmental responses to these concerns invariably draw on technocratic solutions involving more procedures, case management systems, information technology and bureaucratic regulation. Such solutions flow from an implicit use of instrumental rationality based on a ‘means-end’ logic. While bringing an important perspective to the problem of child protection error, instrumental rationality has been overused limiting discretion and other modes of rational inquiry. This paper argues that the social work profession should apply an enlarged form of rationality comprising not only the instrumental-rational mode but also the critical-rational, affective-rational and communicative-rational forms. It is suggested that this combined, conceptual arsenal of rational inquiry leads to a gestalt that has been termed the holistic-rational perspective. It is also argued that embracing a more rounded perspective such as this might offer greater opportunities for reducing child protection error.     

'Lifeworld', 'System' and Family Group Conferences: Habermas's Contribution to Discourse in Child Protection

Habermas’s critical social theory has been challengedon a range of fronts. However, the authors see merit in hismediation thesis as set out in the seminal text, Between Factsand Norms (1996). Adopting a pragmatist defence of the thesis,we review and demonstrate the effectiveness of what we believeis a coincidental expression of some of its main tenets—TheFamily Group Conference in Child Protection. Drawing furtheron Habermas’s work, we then proceed to re-work aspectsof the conference’s core processes, thereby accentuatingthe possibility of empowering dialogue between its key participants:the families (who embody the ‘lifeworld’) and thesocial work professionals (who represent the ‘system’).In the final section, we argue that moral practice in childprotection must be safeguarded by communicational proceduresthat explicitly address issues relating to the use of powerand the need for ‘recognition’ between subjects.     

A methodological assessment of the use of key informants

The key informant technique is assessed in terms of the ability of different types of informants to report on various aspects of the social system in which they perform role functions. Role theory suggests that informants occupying a specialized role within a social structure provide greater information on role-related aspects of the structure than informants occupying positions unrelated to the area being investigated. Empirical evidence in support of this assertion is presented.     

Work Hours,Schedules, and Insufficient Sleep Among Mothers and Their Young Children

Studies have linked parents' employment, work hours, and work schedules to their own sleep quality and quantity, but it is unclear whether these associations extend to children. The authors used data from the 5‐year in‐home survey of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 1,818) to examine the associations between maternal work hours and schedule and insufficient sleep among disadvantaged mothers and their young children. They found that mothers who worked more than 35 hours per week were more likely to experience insufficient sleep compared to mothers who worked fewer hours, whereas children were more likely to experience insufficient sleep when their mothers worked between 20 and 40 hours. Nonstandard work schedules were associated with an increased likelihood of insufficient sleep for mothers but not their children. The results highlight a potentially difficult balance between work and family for many disadvantaged working mothers in the United States.     

Test–Retest Reliability in Infant Speech Perception Tasks

A long line of research investigates how infants learn the sounds and words in their ambient language over the first year of life, through behavioral tasks involving discrimination and recognition. More recently, individual performance in such tasks has been used to predict later language development. Does this mean that dependent measures in such tasks are reliable and can stably measure speech perception skills over short time spans? Our three laboratories independently tested infants with a given task and retested them within 0–18 days. Together, we can report data from 12 new experiments (total number of paired observations N = 409), ranging from vowel and consonant discrimination to recognition of phrasal units. Results reveal that reliability is extremely variable across experiments. We discuss possible causes and implications of this variability, as well as the main effects revealed by this work. Additionally, we offer suggestions for the field of infant speech perception to improve the reliability of its methodologies through data repositories and crowd sourcing.     

Estimating Housing Quality for Poverty and Development Policy Analysis: CWIQ in Ghana

Inadequate data on housing characteristics and lack of consensusregarding appropriate measures of housing quality characteristicsretard developments to meet housing needs of people in lessdeveloped countries. A constructed housing quality index is developed and Cronbach's alpha and factor analysis are employedeo evaluate its measurement properties. With data from the CoreWelfare Indicators Questionnaire (CWIQ) survey of 1997, theconstructed housing quality index identifies key factors relatedto housing quality in Ghana. Access to quality of life amenities contributes significant information and policy value to traditionalphysical attributes in modeling a housing quality index.     

Assessing parenting capacity in child protection: towards a knowledge‐based model

The assessment of parenting capacity continues to engender public concern in cases of suspected harm to children. This paper outlines a model for approaching this task based on the application of three key domains of knowledge in social work relating to facts, theory and practice wisdom. The McMaster Model of Family Assessment is identified out of this process and reworked to give it a sharper focus on parenting roles and responsibilities. Seven formative dimensions of parenting are then elicited and combined with an analytical process of identifying strengths, concerns, prospects for growth and impact on child outcomes. The resulting assessment framework, it is argued, adds rigour to professional judgements about parenting capacity and enhances formulations on risk in child protection.