Procedural causality hidden in child welfare assessments

This article highlights practice-based causalities in child welfare by examining one template used to assess children’s and families’ needs for services in child welfare and asks how the template presents and connects the themes of the assessment with each other and with the conclusion of the assessment. The template is approached as an institutional script which guides social workers to
record the assessment in an institutionally relevant way.
The analysis, based on interpretative reading of the empty template, highlights procedural causality. Procedural causality rests on standardized positions of children and parents in the services as well as on the pre-existing categories which social workers are expected to use. This standardization
originates mainly from legislation. Consequently, standardization and juridification transform the ‘assessment of needs for services’ into ‘the assessment of client selection’; in other words, to serve the institutional purpose of processing people in and out of services. Consequently, it is argued
that in order to learn about the social work conceptualization of causality, it could be beneficial to study the variety of factors shaping practice, even as mundane as templates.