Parents' involvement in care order decisions: a cross-country study of front-line practice

Berrick, Jill, Dickens, Jonathan, Poso, Tarja and Skivenes, Marit (2017) Parents' involvement in care order decisions: a cross-country study of front-line practice. Child and Family Social Work, 22 (2). 626–637. ISSN 1356-7500

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Abstract

This article examines parents’ involvement in care order decision-making in four countries at one particular point in the care order process, namely when the child protection worker discusses with the parents his/her considerations regarding child removal. The countries represent different child welfare systems with Norway and Finland categorized as ‘family service systems’ and the US as a ‘child protection system’, with England somewhere in between. The focus is on whether the forms and intensity of involvement are different in these four countries, and whether the system orientation towards family services or child protection influences practice in the social welfare agencies with parents. Involvement is studied in terms of providing information to parents, collecting information from parents and ensuring inclusion in the decision-making processes. A vignette method is employed in a survey with 768 responses from child protection workers in four countries. The findings do not show a consistent pattern of difference regarding parental involvement in care order preparations that align with the type of child welfare system in which staff work. The goal in each child welfare system is to include parents, but the precise ways in which it is done (or not) vary. Methodological suggestions are given for further studies.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The copyright line for this article was changed on 31 March 2016 after original online publication
Uncontrolled Keywords:	child protection,decision-making,comparative child welfare ,care orders, vignettes
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Social Work
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Child Protection (former - to 2017) Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Child Placement (former - to 2017) Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Child Protection & Family Support Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Research on Children and Families
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	22 Mar 2016 09:21
Last Modified:	14 Jun 2023 12:24
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/57730
DOI:	10.1111/cfs.12277

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