Reasoning and Bias: Heuristics in Safety Assessment and Placement Decisions for Children at Risk

Whether the decision-making process for children at risk is biased against families from lower socio-economic or minority statuses remains a vexing question for social work practice and research. This study successfully isolates the subjective decision-making process and the intervening effect of overexposure of disadvantaged families to the welfare system by utilising a vignette-based factorial survey. The vignettes were drawn from actual...