Welcome to the CPS Practice Potpourri. Caseworkers, supervisors, and managers will find a new forum for ideas, solutions, and methods in CPS Practice. ACTION staff and invited quest will offer you their insight and observation on CPS practice. We hope CPS Practice Potpourri will meet your demand for practical and experience based observation that will be resource to support and enhance your work with children and families. Send us an email and let us know what you think. Come back and visit CPS Practice Potpourri often.

Do What You Do, With What You Have, Where You Are.

What can the lone caseworker do? If you go to the experts you will find something that a CPS worker who has been on the job for thirty days knows. The task of the child protection caseworker is overwhelming. Caseloads are too large. A 1998 study of New York's child welfare services found that high workload resulted in incomplete abuse and neglect investigations, an inability for workers to regularly monitor clients, and prolonged permanency decisions for children. The experts tell us that to really make a difference in a family the worker needs to spend time with that family. Caseworkers are also under trained, under paid and under extreme scrutiny when things go wrong. Oh yes and a lot of caseworkers burn out, stress out, and wear out too. Some stay and do what they do, with what they have, where they are.

What do caseworkers do, with what they have, where they are? Fundamentally it comes down to this. Caseworkers make decisions about what constitutes ensuring and keeping a child safe from harm. Decision-making is primary, the first order, the essential in what a caseworker does. Eric Hoffer once said to point out the obvious is to call it into question.

So the question may be asked is there something about decision-making that could assist the caseworker in making decisions? The answer is yes. In the late eighties Psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Price in economics for telling us that people use unconscious shortcuts to cope with complex decisions and that sometimes these “decisions lead to severe and systematic errors.” He called these unconscious shortcuts heuristics.

The following is a list of so called decision-making errors that a caseworker might want to consider in order to do what they do, where they are, with what they have.

Comfort Zone Biases: Tendency to do what is comfortable rather than what is important

Caseworkers may:

1. Become attached to the decisions they made in the past.
2. Value the way they make decision as though they are owned by them
3. Ignore information inconsistent with their current beliefs
4. Fail to learn and correct their beliefs despite strong evidence that they should do so.
5. Keep doing the same things, even if they no longer work well
6. Distort their views of reality in order to feel more comfortable

Perception Biases: Beliefs are distorted by faulty perceptions.

Caseworkers may:

1. Anchor on information that is readily available, vivid or recent.
2. Make insufficient adjustments from their initial anchors.
3. Ascribe more credibility to data than is warranted.
4. Overestimate what they know.
5. Underestimate the effort involved to complete a difficult task.
6. Give different answers to the same question posed in different ways

Motivation Biases: motivation and incentives may tend to bias their judgments

Caseworkers may:

1. Unconsciously distort judgments to "look good" and "get ahead."
2. Take actions as if concerned only with short-term consequences.
3. Attribute good decisions to skill, bad outcomes to others' failures or bad luck.
4. Escalate commitments to avoid questioning earlier decisions.
5. Favor actions that shield them from potentially unfavorable feedback.

Errors in Reasoning: use flawed reasoning to reach incorrect conclusions

Caseworkers may:

1. Simplify inappropriately.
2. Are persuaded by circular reasoning, false analogies, and other fallacious arguments.
3. Are surprised by statistically likely "coincidences."
4. Base the credibility of an argument on its manner of presentation.
5. Abhor risk but seek bigger risks to avoid a sure loss.
6. Cannot solve even simple probability problems in their heads.

Tasks Analysis and Behaviors: approach to decision-making may adds additional distortions

Caseworkers may:

1. Dive in" without having all of the necessary information.
2. Are excessively cautious in sharing data.
3. Avoid expressing opposing views.
4. Jump to conclusions prematurely or get bogged down trying to reach agreement.
5. Create illusions of invulnerability and ignore external views of the morality of their actions

Reed Holder, M. Div., is Director of Government and Customer Relations for ACTION for Child Protection, Inc. He has been in the Human Services and Child Welfare field for 35 years.