Dalgleish scores difference amongst professional roles within the greater child welfare community

Background

The central tension of the child welfare system is the need to protect children while also encouraging the stability of families. Researchers have attempted to capture this conflict through the use of the Dalgleish Scale (Fluke et al., 2016), which measures attitudes about family preservation versus child safety.

Objective

Though used multiple times by researchers over the last decade to test state agency child protection worker's beliefs, the Dalgleish Scale has never before been given to the wider child welfare community.

Participants setting

Taken from data collected from more than a 1000 U.S. participants as part of two separate online child welfare decision making survey vignette experiments, this present research is the first to administer the Dalgleish to people from multiple professional roles within the child welfare system.

Methods

Dalgleish scores for 13 child welfare professional roles were compared using Mann Whitney U to test for significance and Cohen's d for effect size, while demographic variables within the roles were tested using ANOVA.

Results

The results demonstrate significant differences in beliefs about child safety and family preservation between the roles within the child welfare system. On average lawyers tended to rate family preservation higher than any other role. Foster parents, CASA/GAL workers and former foster youth tended to score the highest on child safety scores. State agency caseworkers scored in the middle though still on the child safety side of the scale.

Conclusions

These significant variances in the Dalgleish score based on role suggest that participants’ professional role within child welfare has an impact on how they view the central dynamic question of family preservation and child safety.