Hood, R., Goldacre, A., Webb, C. orcid.org/0000-0001-7521-2110 et al. (3 more authors) (2021) Beyond the toxic trio: exploring demand typologies in children’s social care. The British Journal of Social Work, 51 (6). pp. 1942-1962. ISSN 0045-3102
Abstract
Demand for children’s social care is often conflated with rates of intervention and associated with a limited constellation of parental risk factors. This article reports on a more comprehensive picture of demand obtained through a quantitative study of child welfare interventions in England. Longitudinal child-level data were combined from children’s social care services in six English local authorities over a four-year period (2015–2018). Latent class analysis was undertaken for a random sample of child episodes where an assessment was undertaken (n = 15,000). The results were tested for consistency across LAs and to identify the most appropriate number of classes. Conditional probabilities were used to interpret the demand represented by each class, and to explore the relationship between typologies and child characteristics such as age, gender and ethnicity. The analysis found seven classes, or typologies of demand, to be present in factors at assessment across all the LAs, which were linked to certain child characteristics and intervention pathways. The findings go beyond the ‘toxic trio’ terminology often used to profile risks to children and support the innovative use of administrative data to provide insight into patterns of demand. Implications are discussed for strategic responses to child welfare problems and the multi-agency context of prevention.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | child abuse; child protection; demand; quantitative analysis; risk factors |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 Nov 2021 13:56 |
Last Modified: | 05 Nov 2021 13:56 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/bjsw/bcab058 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:180069 |