Professional judgement and decision-making in social work

Welcome to the second of two inter-related special issues. The first focused upon risk in social work (Whittaker & Taylor, 2017) and this special issue focuses upon professional judgement and decision-making. It consists of eight articles across a range of countries and settings that examine key issues that are relevant to practitioners and managers as well as researchers and policy-makers.

When professional judgement and decision-making in social work are discussed, the focus is often upon formal decisions that are life changing, such as whether a child needs to be removed from a family, a person with mental health problems needs to be detained against their will or an older person moving into residential care. However, it is important to recognise that we make countless decisions everyday in our professional lives that are less high profile but which can be as important. Equally important is the fact that we make many judgements where we recommend a course of action even if we do not make the final decision (Taylor, 2017a).

The Nobel Prize-winning decision researcher Herbert Simon argued that in order to understand human decision-making, it is necessary to examine both the individual decision-maker and their decision environment. He used the metaphor of a pair of scissors, in which the individual and the decision environment are like the two blades of the scissors (Simon, 1956). This conceptual model provides a useful framework for understanding the themes of the special issue.

The role of the decision environment on decision makers

The interaction between the decision-maker and their environment is particularly important in social work. Settings that involve high-profile decision-making, such as child protection and mental health, can generate considerable anxiety in both practitioners and managers. This anxiety can increase the likelihood of organisational defences (Cooper & Whittaker, 2014; Whittaker, 2011) and the risk of practitioners engaging in defensive practice (Whittaker & Havard, 2016). A key aspect of the interaction between the decision-maker and the environment is the relationship between practitioners and their managers. This is examined in the first three articles that examine how decision environments influence decision makers.

The first article, by Rachel Falconer and Steven Shardlow, presents the findings of an international comparative study that examines the influence of national and organisational factors on practice-level decision reasoning in child protection services in England and Finland. Using hypothetical case vignettes, many similaraties were noted in the ways that social workers in both countries responded. However, there were significant differences in the ways in which managers were involved in the decision-making processes. Finnish social workers described a ‘supported’ model of professional judgement and decision-making, which was a more horizontal and shared decision-making approach. By contrast, the English social workers described a ‘supervised’ model, which was more hierarchical, ‘top down’ approach to decision-making. The implications for the support and supervision that practitioners receive in both systems are discussed.

In the second article, by Gillian Ruch and Danielle Turney, the relationship between practitioners and supervisors is examined in the context of implementing an innovative method of supervision, the Cognitive and Affective Supervisory Approach (CASA) within children’s services in the UK. The process of trialling the approach highlighted two challenges. Firstly, the challenge to practitioners of engaging in ‘detailed looking’, as this allows for the emotionally painful dimensions of practice to more accessible. Secondly, the challenge to supervisors to utilise ‘active listening’ instead of their usual problem-solving skills, which are valued by organisational cultures that prioritise fast turn around and through-put of cases. Consequently, this approach provides an opportunity for greater consideration of the listening dimension of supervisory practice, while recognising that this requires a counter-cultural mindset in many child protection settings.

The role of the decision environment on the decision-maker is taken to its logical conclusion when the influence of national and international developments are taken into consideration. The third article, by Jim Campbell, Lisa Brophy, Gavin Davidson and Ann-Marie O’Brien, examines how the introduction of new capacity legislation in different countries has led to substantial changes in professional approaches to decision-making in mental health. A key development is the expectation that mental health practitioners engage more in supported decision-making to prevent the need for substitute decision-making. Drawing upon the authors’ experiences in Australia, Canada, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, it explores how this paradigm shift in law, policy and practice challenges social work to refine skills, knowledge and values.

Discretion in professional decision-making

The interaction between the decision-maker and their environment is also a central focus in the debates about the influence of a managerial culture in social work. In some social work settings, practitioner judgement appears - or feels to be - tightly restricted within legislation and organisational regulation. This is emphasised in critiques of managerialist discourses, in which practitioners have little discretion and feel obliged to enforce risk-averse priorities. Lipsky’s concept of the ‘street level bureaucrat’ has been useful in examining this more closely, exploring how front line practitioners may have more discretion than would be apparent within organisational systems. In the next three articles, the role of professional discretion is examined in a study of elder care services in Sweden, a study of child protection decision-making in Spain and a study of child protection services in the UK.

The fourth article, by Anna Olaison, Sandra Torres and Emilia Forssell, uses the concept of the ‘street level bureaucrat’ to understand the role of professional discretion in the everyday work of care managers within elder care in Sweden. Their study explores the role that experience plays in the use of professional discretion and examines how this develops as practitioners gain experience. While less experienced care managers were concerned about assessing in the ‘correct’ manner, many experienced managers were comfortable working outside local guidelines on the basis that they were prioritising the overall goal of the legislation. Another of the intereresting aspects was that care managers made a distinction between ‘bureaucratic work’ and ‘social work’, which they saw as different roles. In many heavily bureaucratised countries, such as the UK, this is a thought provoking perspective.

In Simon’s analogy of the decision scissors, it must be recognised that there are individual differences between decision-makers that cannot simply be reduced to the effect of the decision environment. This is the focus of the fifth article by Amaia Mosteiro, Usue Beloki, Emma Sobremonte and Arantxa Rodríguez, which examines variability in decision-making within child protection services in the Basque Country in Spain. Using a vignette design, they examined the arguments put forward by over 200 social workers, social educators and psychologists to justify a decision whether or not to remove a child from her family. There was significant variability between their decisions, with two-thirds recommending that the child remains with her family while the other third recommended removal. However, there was significant agreement on the criteria that should be used to make the decision. Consequently, they concluded that the variability lies not so much with the criteria but with the weight that they should be given and their interpretation in the decision-making process.

Some outsiders regard decision-making in highly regulated areas of social work such as child protection as purely a case of following guidance (Ferguson, 2004). This is explored in the sixth article by Nhlanganiso Nyathi, which is an empirical study that draws upon interviews with practitioners and observations of child protection meetings to examine real life decision processes. Rather than simply relying upon child protection guidance, he found that practitioners used both discretionary intuition and analytical judgement in their decision-making. There has been a long debate about intuitive and analytic thinking in social work (Whittaker, 2018) and more recently exploration about the role of heuristics (Kirkman & Melrose, 2014; Taylor, 2017b). Nyathi found practitioners took into account a number of dimensions, including the consensus between professionals and with family members; the individual professional’s state of mind; the priorities of other agencies and professionals; and organisational factors such as the availability of resources. He concludes that this use of a combination of intuitive heuristics and analytical thinking has the potential to aid our understanding – and hence our teaching – of professional judgement and decision-making.

Learning and managing professional judgement in everyday practice

The role of experience in professional judgement and organisational culture is the focus of the seventh article, by Kate Leonard and Louise O’Connor. This is based on a six-year qualitative study of social workers’ perspectives on the factors that influence their decision-making in children and families social work in the UK. They found a number of aspects that were important; the challenge of developing agency in the social work role; the influence of troubling emotions; key transitions in the development of expertise and the impact of organisational cultures. They conclude that as practitioners gain experience and expertise, they move through three stages. The first role as a student is an ‘outsider observer’ role, which becomes an ‘inside player’ social worker role and at the final stage it becomes an ‘inside expert player’ role as an advanced practitioner or manager.

In the eighth article, by Martin Kettle, the focus is upon how child protection social workers in Scotland used their professional judgement in their everyday work with families. Based upon in-depth interviews with practitioners using a grounded theory methodology, the study found that social workers continuously walked a tightrope between two sets of tensions. The first tension was between closeness and distance, where the challenge for the practitioner was to avoid becoming so close to the family that they became enmeshed while not becoming so remote that they became ineffective. The second tension was between using ‘power over’ (the ‘wagging the finger stuff’) and ‘power together’, a more cooperative form of power. While families often perceived social workers as powerful, the practitioners themselves often were more conscious of the limits of the power that came with the role. Kettle also makes the important point that interprofessional interactions can be understood as ‘transactions’ that involve not only explicit transfers of information but also implicit transfers of anxiety and responsibility.

Conclusions

These studies match wider developments within the decision, assessment and risk research community, which has been growing in recent years. As noted in the previous editorial, exciting current developments include two key international networks; DARE and DARSIG. The first of these is the Decision, Assessment, Risk and Evidence (DARE) conference, which is a biennial conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which has been running since 2010 (www.ulster.ac.uk/dare). The forthcoming conference in July 2018 has papers from 22 countries, and the growing importance of the research domain is highlighted by the fact that the European Social Work Research Association (ESWRA) has supported international scholarships for participants from lower income European countries.

The second international network is the Decision, Assessment and Risk Special Interest Group (DARSIG), which is part of the European Social Work Research Association (Taylor & Sharland, 2015). Formed in 2014, it is developing momentum and currently has over 30 members from 15 countries (Taylor et al., 2017). Key areas of research that DARSIG has identified concerning professional judgement include reflective practice; models of cognitive judgement, heuristics and rationality; use of various types of knowledge; judgements in uncertainty; and the role of bias. In the area of decision-making, currently identified topics include decision processes with clients, families, other professionals, systems and organisations; social work roles in court decisions; collaborative and contested decisions; and structured decision processes with clients (www.eswra.org/decisions_sig.html). Within these topics there is exciting research developing but much more to explore!

We hope that these articles are interesting and thought provoking to you, and support you in your social work role, whether as a practitioner, manager, trainer, regulator, policy-maker or researcher.

Brian Taylor
Professor of Social Work, Ulster University, Northern Ireland
Andrew Whittaker
Associate Professor of Social Work, London South Bank University
[email protected]