Child Protective Services Decision Outcomes and the Role of Outragean Empirical Test

Abstract

This chapter places a model component to an empirical test using a national data set, allowing the exploration of the relative impacts of outrage, child protective services (CPS) agency inputs, and social risk factors such as race and poverty. It uses national data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). Data show that states with active court orders have lower sexual abuse rates. The children's race/ethnicity, child age, and residence in nonworking households are the measures of hazard that consistently exert some effects on CPS decisions. The effects of child fatality, as well as the CPS court order, positive equilibrium change and negative equilibrium change are particularly robust, qualitatively speaking. The results also reveal that outrage generally outperforms hazards, CPS organizational inputs, welfare reform, poverty, and economic conditions in explaining variance in CPS outcomes.