Discretionary decision making in child welfare – An experimental vignette study of the use of interpreter services

Abstract

This paper focuses on child welfare workers’ discretionary decision making. They can rely on routines, procedures and manuals as part of their work, but in the end, they still have to make a choice, based on the available information at the time. Discretionary decision making is a way of reasoning when facing uncertainty in professional work and when laws, rules and systematic knowledge must be applied in specific cases. A larger body of research on discretion and discretionary decision making in social work has developed, but there remains much ground to cover in terms of empirical analyses of how discretionary processes play out in real-life contexts.The two main research questions ask how the characteristics of each child and context and of social workers and their work situation affect the latter’s decision to use interpreter services in their work with unaccompanied minors and children from minority backgrounds. The decision to use or not to use interpreter services in different situations, as an act of discretionary decision making by child welfare workers, is analysed in this paper. To study discretionary decision making among child welfare workers, a combination of a traditional survey and a vignette experiment has been used, bringing together organisational features, individual traits and situational characteristics. The findings indicate that interpreter services are less likely to be used in acute situations and more likely to be used with the children whom the child welfare staff members know better, irrespective of the children’s language skills. The analyses also show varying effects of the staff’s training and educational backgrounds, and surprisingly, the negative effects of institutional guidelines. One possible interpretation of this is that the guidelines are perceived as rigid constraints, instead of positive recommendations for actions.