Reporting a Black Child's Situation to Protective Services: Differences in Decision Making by Caseworkers in Administrative Areas With Disproportionately High and Low Reports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In both Canada and the United States, Black children are over‐represented among children reported to Child Protective Services (CPS). The biases of mandated reporters are thought to contribute to this over‐representation. Prior studies have rarely examined the relationship between the over‐representation of Black children among children reported to CPS and the characteristics of the administrative areas in which mandated reporters work. This study describes and compares the processes leading professionals in two sets of administrative areas to decide to report a child to CPS rather than attempt to find other solutions (two areas with a high disproportion and low concentration of Blacks; two areas with a low disproportion and high concentration of Blacks). Verbatim transcripts of 35 individual interviews with professionals were first qualitatively analysed by topic then compared by administrative area. Four focus groups with a total of 26 caseworkers then enabled us to validate and interpret the decision‐making model derived from the interview analysis. The components of the decision‐making process that differ between areas are described and interpreted, with particular attention given to the diversity of alternatives to reporting, the subjective threshold leading to reporting, and cultural sensitivity. The implications for research and practice are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".