Hi, I am Devansh Saxena and today I will be discussing our paper Unpacking Invisible Work
Practices, Constraints, and Latent Power Relationships in Child Welfare through Casenote Analysis
This work is led by Dr. Shion Guha in the Faculty of information at the university of
Toronto.
Caseworkers are trained to write detailed narratives about their interactions with families.
Unlike other administrative data, casenotes contain more contextual details and offer
a more credible source of information where they highlight caseworkers interactions with
families as well as the impact of systemic factors.
So, the question becomes - which contextual signals and latent themes can be derived from
these casenotes using NLP techniques.
Caseworkers write detailed narratives about cases and also completed quantitative risk
assessments.
Algorithms in child-welfare have continued to focus on risk assessment data.
However, casenotes contain more contextual details about cases in the form of critical
decisions, circucumstances surrounding those decisions, uncertainties and confounding factors
among other details.
So, in this study, we ask - what can we learn about the nature of child-welfare practice
from casenotes using NLP techniques.
Specifically, these are our research questions -
How can computational text analysis help uncover invisible patterns of street-level labor conducted
by caseworkers?
How does computational text analysis highlight the systemic constraints placed on caseworkers’
discretion?
How can computational text analysis help investigate latent power relationships in CWS?
This is what an interdisciplinary child-welfare team looks like.
For the purpose of this study, we specifically focus on the Family preservation team.
This team works closely with families and their goals are fully aligned with goals of
birth parents where they help them in their efforts to achieve reunification.
We analyze casenotes written over a period of two years.
There are about 9000 casnote entires about a total of 310 families.
We trained an unsupervised LDA topic model because it provides easily interpretable insights
and is a great starting point.
Me and two of my co-authors individually interpreted and labeled topics and then discussed our
labeling to reach a consensus.
Next we sent our labels, top keywords and exemplar casenotes to supervisors to get their
feedback.
Their feedback allows us to refine our labels and interpretation, resulting in our final
topic model.
We further grouped the 17 topics into six high-level themes for easy readability.
This is the street-level discretionary work that caseworkers are doing.
Helping Families Secure Resources and Navigate Bureaucratic Processes
Facilitating Interactions between Children and Parents during Supervised Visits
Coordinating Time, Travel, and Pickup Logistics for Visitations & Appointments
Observing and Recording Concerns during Transportation But I want to draw your attention towards
the next two.
Managing medical consent, medication schedules, and medical appointments for foster children
and conducting quantitative assessments to determine risks and progress.
We spent almost two years at the agency and had no idea that caseworkers were doing this
work.
We also looked at job descriptions for caseworkers positions for DCF and this work isn’t highlighted
in them either.
Child-welfare is always presented as a monolith but caseworkers support different families
in different capacities and it is necessary to understand this nuance.
We divided the 310 families into Low, Medium, and High needs groups based on their number
of interactions with the agency.
These violin plot highlight the number of months each group spent with the agency and
the width of the violin represents frequency of interactions.
Next, we wanted to see which topics emerge as being significant at different stages of
the life of case for each of these groups.
So this is what we did -
For each family in each group, we chronologically arranged and concatenated casenotes.
So for instance, we intended up with 119 chronological casenotes for 119 families for Group 1.
Then we divided these casenotes into 10 sections or 10 time segments and this sequence of sections
is what we call “Life of a Case” Then we plotted distribution of topics over
the Life of a Case.
For the sake of time, I will share three examples from Group 2 to highlight how critical decision
points or events can be extracted from casenotes.
“Observations in Parenting Classes” emerges at three critical points in the case.
At the onset, caseworkers are focused on assessing if parents are able to manage the behaviors
of children.
A nd we see this topic emerge periodically until
concerns around parenting go down.
This is also followed by the completion of two structured parenting assessment by the
family preservation team.
First assessment is complete at about 30% mark through the life of a case.
The final assessment is completed and submitted to court close to case closure.
Similarly, an initial home safety assessment in conducted at the onset of a case and one
completed towards the end to ensure that necessary changes have been made within the household
to provide a safe environment.
Next, we wanted to see what the day-to-day power relationships as depicted in casenotes
look like and whether we could derive some meaningful insights from casenotes regarding
power.
This table represents the key personas that appear in most of the casenotes.
But we decided to focus on the top 5 personas since medical parties, legal parties, and
significant others appear rather sparsely.
Please see the full paper for details about this power analysis approach.
This figure depicts cumulative power scores for each of the five personas in Group 1.
That is, low needs families.
For Group 1, We see that birth parents exhibit the most power.
Group 1 involves cases of neglect such as poor dental hygiene of a child and can quickly
be resolved with adequate actions from the parents.
So, birth parents exhibit the most power in this group while other personas act in an
assistive capacity.
Children are also not removed from the care of their parents for most of these cases.
For Group 2, foster parents exercise the most power.
These are short-term foster parents that care for children while parents make the necessary
changes in their household.
This also aligns with what we observe on the ground.
Once a child is placed with foster parents, caseworkers cater more to them than birth
parents.
This is the case because there is a lack of foster homes in the system and caseworkers
must maintain good relationships with foster parents so they have homes to place children.
Here are the key takeaways – This is the first study to conduct a computational
inspection of child welfare casenotes and introduces them as a critical data source
It uncovers invisible patterns of human discretionary work and bureaucratic processes that impact
decision-making It highlights systemic constraints where different
families need to be supported in different capacities
It also makes visible latent power relationships where caseworkers’ shared power with birth
parents and foster parents