Proprietary firms and child welfare services: patterns and implications

Results from a comprehensive survey of public child welfare services reveal that for-profit firms are widely used as purchase-of-service contractors despite the social service field's traditional philosophical opposition to proprietary involvement in human service delivery. Taking note of this and larger economic trends, the author suggests several attitudinal and administrative adjustments that could make contracting a more effective tool for serving children, and the choice of vendor an empirical, rather than ideological, issue.