title: Social disorganization and the profile of child welfare: Explaining child welfare activity by the community-level factors.
abstract: This article addresses the question of the structure of local child welfare activities in light of community-level factors. It poses the following research questions: how are different community-level factors related to child welfare client structures in communities and what is the extent to which these factors explain structural differences? The applied theoretical framework is based on social disorganization and strain theories as well as human developmental approach. The data has been collected from two Finnish national databases and it consists of variables containing 257 Finnish municipalities. The method of analysis is multinomial logistic regression. The results suggest that the local child welfare structures are tied to social disorganization, policing and culture as well as to the intensity of control in the communities. In general, the more fragile the communal structures, the more last-resort child welfare there is in the community. Combining fragile communal structures with weak dependency ratio and high proportion of social workers, the more intense the level of child welfare statistics indicated. The results indicate that the theoretical framework for the application of child welfare activity analysis is justified, but they also suggest that it requires further development through both context-bound reflection and application.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Research, Snellmaninkatu 10/Box 16, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Timo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Harrikari
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002662:Child Health Services / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000458:organization & administration*; D002669:Child Welfare / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005387:Finland; D005581:Foster Home Care / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012111:Residence Characteristics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012947:Social Work / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: Child protection; Child welfare; Community; Multinomial regression analysis; Social disorganization theory