Factors associated with the decision to investigate child protective services referrals: A systematic review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Limited resources for child protection create challenging decision situations for child protective services (CPS) workers at the point of intake. A body of research has examined the factors associated with worker decisions and processes using a variety of methodological approaches to gain knowledge on decision‐making. However, few attempts have been made to systematically review this literature. As part of a larger project on decision‐making at intake, this systematic review addressed the question of the factors associated with worker decisions to investigate alleged maltreatment referrals. Quantitative studies that examined factors associated with screening decisions in CPS practice settings were included in the review. Database and other search methods were used to identify research published in English over a 35‐year period (1980–2015). Of 1,147 identified sources, 18 studies were selected for full data extraction. The studies were conducted in the United States, Canada, and Sweden and varied in methodological quality. Most studies examined case factors with few studies examining other domains. To inform CPS policy and practice, additional research is needed to examine the relationships between decision‐making factors and case outcomes. Greater attention needs to be given to the organizational and external factors that influence decision‐making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it