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Common errors of reasoning in child protection work.

¹Department of Social Policy and Administration, London School of Economics, England.

Child Abuse & Neglect

|September 7, 1999

Summary

Child protection professionals make predictable reasoning errors due to cognitive biases. Awareness and structured reasoning aids can improve decision-making in child abuse cases.

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Social Work
Public Policy

Background:

Public inquiries into child abuse tragedies highlight persistent failures in child protection services.
Similar findings across inquiries suggest limited impact on improving professional practice.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if recurrent errors in child protection practice stem from known psychological biases in human reasoning.
To analyze professional reasoning and inquiry findings to identify patterns of error.

Main Methods:

Content analysis of 45 British child abuse inquiry reports (1973-1994).
Application of a framework from psychological research on reasoning to assess professional decision-making.

Main Results:

Professionals exhibited risk assessment bias, relying on narrow, readily available, and vivid information.
Evidence was often faulty due to biased reporting or communication errors.
Judgments were slow to be revised despite accumulating contradictory evidence.

Conclusions:

Errors in child protection reasoning are systematic and predictable, linked to intuitive judgment simplification.
Increased awareness of these cognitive biases can mitigate errors.
Development of reasoning aids is needed to systematically check intuitive judgments in complex cases.

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