Decision making in child protection:An international comparative study on maltreatment substantiation, risk assessment and interventions recommendations, and the role of professionals’ child welfare attitudes

Item does not contain fulltextChild welfare professionals regularly make crucial decisions that have a significant impact on children and their families. The present study presents the Judgments and Decision Processes in Context model (JUDPIC) and uses it to examine the relationships between three independent domains: case characteristic (mother's wish with regard to removal), practitioner characteristic (child welfare attitudes), and protective system context (four countries: Israel, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland and Spain); and three dependent factors: substantiation of maltreatment, risk assessment, and intervention recommendation. The sample consisted of 828 practitioners from four countries. Participants were presented with a vignette of a case of alleged child maltreatment and were asked to determine whether maltreatment was substantiated, assess risk and recommend an intervention using structured instruments. Participants’ child welfare attitudes were assessed. The case characteristic of mother's wish with regard to removal had no impact on judgments and decisions. In contrast, practitioners’ child welfare attitudes were associated with substantiation, risk assessments and recommendations. There were significant country differences on most measures. The findings support most of the predictions derived from the JUDPIC model. The significant differences between practitioners from different countries underscore the importance of context in child protection decision making. Training should enhance practitioners’ awareness of the impact that their attitudes and the context in which they are embedded have on their judgments and decisions

Salivary Immune Markers are not Associated with Self-Reported Childhood Maltreatment or Psychopathology in Adults

This study is part of a larger project named the 3G family study. In this specific paper we examine associations between maltreatment, psychopathology and immune markers in saliva. Due to the sensitivity of the data, only the immune data is published in this package

Additional file 3 of PredictCBC-2.0: a contralateral breast cancer risk prediction model developed and validated in ~ 200,000 patients

Additional file 1: Table S3. Patient and primary breast cancer characteristics per study

Additional file 2 of PredictCBC-2.0: a contralateral breast cancer risk prediction model developed and validated in ~ 200,000 patients

Additional file 2: Table S1. Description of the studies included in the analyses

Additional file 1 of To continue or not to continue? Antipsychotic medication maintenance versus dose-reduction/discontinuation in first episode psychosis: HAMLETT, a pragmatic multicenter single-blind randomized controlled trial

Additional file 1: Table S1. Tapering off schedules