Racial Disparities in Child Welfare: A Decision-Making Ecology View

This chapter casts the theoretical framework called the Decision-Making Ecology (DME) (Baumann, Dalgleish, Fluke, & Kern, 2011) integrated with the General Assessment and Decision Model (GADM) as a research framework to help understand and develop insights about disparities in child welfare. The chapter provides an overview of the history and theoretical underpinnings of decision-making theory and research and translates these into child welfare settings. Research examples illustrating the applicability of the DME to understanding disparities in child welfare are used to clarify the key theoretical principles of the DME and GADM. The use of the disparity index to describe worker decision making behaviour is presented as a way to understand how disparity at the worker level varies. Finally, the chapter considers how decision-making research could be translated into practice and policy with the goal of reducing disparities.