title: The decision of out-of-home placement in residential care after parental neglect: Empirically testing a psychosocial model.
abstract: Out-of-home placement decisions in residential care are complex, ambiguous and full of uncertainty, especially in cases of parental neglect. Literature on this topic is so far unable to understand and demonstrate the source of errors involved in those decisions and still fails to focus on professional's decision making process. Therefore, this work intends to test a socio-psychological model of decision-making that is a more integrated, dualistic and ecological version of the Theory of Planned Behavior's model. It describes the process through which the decision maker takes into account personal, contextual and social factors of the Decision-Making Ecology in the definition of his/her decision threshold. One hundred and ninety-five professionals from different Children and Youth Protection Units, throughout the Portuguese territory, participated in this online study. After reading a vignette of a (psychological and physical) neglect case toward a one-year-old child, participants were presented with a group of questions that measured worker's assessment of risk, intention, attitude, subjective norm, behavior control and beliefs toward residential care placement decision, as well as worker's behavior experience, emotions and family/child-related-values involved in that decision. A set of structural equation modeling analyses have proven the good fit of the proposed model. The intention to propose a residential care placement decision was determined by cognitive, social, affective, value-laden and experience variables and the perceived risk. Altogether our model explained 61% of professional's decision toward a parental neglect case. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed, namely the importance of raising awareness about the existence of these biased psychosocial determinants.
authors.affiliation: University Institute of Lisbon, ISCTE, Cis-IUL, Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: Leonor
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Rodrigues
authors.affiliation: University Institute of Lisbon, ISCTE, Cis-IUL, Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: Manuela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Calheiros
authors.affiliation: University of Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences, Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: Cícero
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pereira
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002649:Child Abuse / Q000517:prevention & control*; D000068216:Child Protective Services / Q000379:methods*; D002669:Child Welfare; D003657:Decision Making; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D036262:Empirical Research; D005260:Female; D005581:Foster Home Care; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011174:Portugal; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D000068217:Social Workers; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Child neglect; Decision-Making Ecology; Dual decision-making process models; Out-of-home placement decision; Residential care placement decision; Risk assessment; Socio-psychosocial approach