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Child Welfare System: Interaction of Policy, Practice and Algorithms

Published: 06 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

This paper focuses on understanding the collaborative work of multi-disciplinary teams in the child welfare system (CWS). CWS workers participate in meetings mediated by policies in place, current child-welfare practice, as well as algorithms that offer recommendations. We conducted 25 observations of these meetings to assess how algorithms aid decision-making in a domain where decisions often come down to the policies and practices in place. Our findings suggest that the algorithm works fairly well at recommending placement settings, however, these recommendations are often overridden because of policy or legal requirements. Moreover, re-appropriation of the placement algorithm to prescribe the rates for foster parents has led to unintended consequences. This poster identifies uses cases of the algorithm in place, scenarios where conflicts arise between the algorithm and policy/practice, as well as how these conflicts are addressed. Our work identifies a need for human-centered algorithms that can better support child welfare practice.

References

[1]
Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Jaclyn Abraham, Arup Kumar Ghosh, and Pamela Wisniewski. 2018. A Stakeholders' Analysis of the Systems that Support Foster Care. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork. ACM, 158--161.
[2]
Eric PS Baumer. 2017. Toward human-centered algorithm design. Big Data & Society 4, 2 (2017), 2053951717718854.
[3]
Sarah Carnochan, Megan Moore, and Michael J Austin. 2013. Achieving placement stability. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work 10, 3 (2013), 235--253.
[4]
Ka Ho Brian Chor, Gary M McClelland, Dana A Weiner, Neil Jordan, and John S Lyons. 2013. Patterns of out-of-home placement decision-making in child welfare. Child abuse & neglect 37, 10 (2013).
[5]
Theodore P Cross, EUN Koh, Nancy Rolock, and Jennifer Eblen-Manning. 2013. Why do children experience multiple placement changes in foster care? Content analysis on reasons for instability. Journal of Public Child Welfare 7, 1 (2013).

Cited By

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  • (2025)Exploring Knowledge Sharing and Community of Practice Development: A Stakeholders Analysis of Social Service Organizations in a Midwestern Underserved CommunityCompanion Proceedings of the 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/3688828.3699645(83-89)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Beyond Predictive Algorithms in Child WelfareProceedings of the 50th Graphics Interface Conference10.1145/3670947.3670976(1-13)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Are We Asking the Right Questions?: Designing for Community Stakeholders’ Interactions with AI in PolicingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642738(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
GROUP '20: Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
January 2020
168 pages
ISBN:9781450367677
DOI:10.1145/3323994
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 January 2020

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Author Tags

  1. algorithmic decision-making
  2. child welfare system
  3. human-centered algorithm design

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  • Poster

Funding Sources

  • William T. Grant Foundation
  • Facebook Computational Social Science Methodology Research Award
  • Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute

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GROUP '20
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Overall Acceptance Rate 125 of 405 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Exploring Knowledge Sharing and Community of Practice Development: A Stakeholders Analysis of Social Service Organizations in a Midwestern Underserved CommunityCompanion Proceedings of the 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/3688828.3699645(83-89)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Beyond Predictive Algorithms in Child WelfareProceedings of the 50th Graphics Interface Conference10.1145/3670947.3670976(1-13)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Are We Asking the Right Questions?: Designing for Community Stakeholders’ Interactions with AI in PolicingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642738(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)“It’s Not What We Were Trying to Get At, but I Think Maybe It Should Be”: Learning How to Do Trauma-Informed Design with a Data Donation Platform for Online Dating Sexual ViolenceProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642045(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)Algorithmic Harms in Child Welfare: Uncertainties in Practice, Organization, and Street-level Decision-MakingACM Journal on Responsible Computing10.1145/3616473Online publication date: 1-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Rethinking "Risk" in Algorithmic Systems Through A Computational Narrative Analysis of Casenotes in Child-WelfareProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581308(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Who Has an Interest in “Public Interest Technology”?: Critical Questions for Working with Local Governments & Impacted CommunitiesCompanion Publication of the 2022 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3500868.3560484(282-286)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Fostering CommunicationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34928346:GROUP(1-23)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Unpacking Invisible Work Practices, Constraints, and Latent Power Relationships in Child Welfare through Casenote AnalysisProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517742(1-22)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2022)How to Train a (Bad) Algorithmic Caseworker: A Quantitative Deconstruction of Risk Assessments in Child WelfareCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts10.1145/3491101.3519771(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
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