Service Referral Patterns Among Black and White Families Involved With Child Protective Services

Abstract

Racial disproportionality in child protective services is widely studied, yet the role of race in caseworkers' service referral decisions remains less understood. Using the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being II, multiple regression models and Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions assess whether the intersection of caseworker and child race predicts differences in service referral decisions, and whether service disparities were primarily explained by racial differences in case characteristics or by differential treatment of families. While many raw differences in service referrals were explained by case characteristics, unexplained differences were found in the types of services to which families were referred.