Social workers’ risk assessment in child protection: the problem of disagreement and a lack of a precise language about risk

Social workers make risk assessments in accordance with their obligation to safeguard and protect children against neglect and abuse. To prevent serious problems, it is necessary to make assessments about the likelihood that social problems emerge in the first place. We investigated 57 Danish social workers’ risk assessments. We used the vignette methodology, setting up a fictitious case and asking respondents to assess two children’s risk of suffering problems in connection with the suicide of their father. We focused on the respondents’ assessments of the magnitude of risk and on how they referred, in their own words, to the protective and risk factors they particularly noticed. There were three results of note. (1) The social workers’ assessments of risk were very divergent. This was the case whether they expressed the magnitude of risk in words or as a percentage. (2) There was no close correspondence between risk assessments expressed in words and as a percentage. Social workers lacked words to communicate the magnitude of risk adequately. (3) There were no significant differences in approach to the assessment of children’s risk between social workers who rated the risk as high, medium or low. All were attentive to both protective and risk factors.