A typology of child protective service cases: design and implementation issues for social work administrators

Case typologies can help to delineate client problems and needs, inform the design of service delivery, and measure service outputs and outcomes. The author describes the development of a typology of the child protective services cases of one large public department of social services. To assist social work administrators develop and apply case classification schemes within their agencies, this typology is used to illustrate the following key conceptual and methodological issues: (1) reasons for case typologies: (2) identifying and selecting case attributes: (3) re-organizing and reducing the number of attributes: and (4) forming groups.