Case constitutional decision-making by the example of child at risk assessments. Negotiations between social work and the courts.

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Pascal Bastian; Professor Dr. Mark Schrödter
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: from 2015 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269325691

In the project preceding the proposed research project, a fast and frugal heuristic has been reconstructed based on ethnographic observations. The heuristic shows how child protection professionals are engaged in sense-making in order to decide whether to close a case or to provide social work services. At the same time, the heuristic demonstrates the central position of the courts in the practice of judgment – even within the anticipations of the social workers. Social workers and judges form a "network of judgments". This sense-making in judgment networks is to be investigated more precisely in the research project to be applied for, with a special emphasis on the negotiations between youth welfare offices and family courts. Thus, the theoretical sampling of the predecessor project is consistently continued. The aim of the research project is to: (1) Examine the sense-making of professionals in advance of negotiations and discussions in court. Above all, team meetings, collegial consultations, day-to-day discussions, etc., are to be ethnographically examined, which take place before the court is called in order to investigate the effects that the anticipation of the court has in advance. (2) Detailed ethnographic investigation social work judgement and negotiations in family court procedings. Discussions and negotiations in court are a central place where concrete "risks" or "harms" are negotiated interdisciplinary, so that it can be analyzed to what extent the social workers actively use the judgment heuristics, thematize it in court or translate their results into "judicial reasoning". The main objective is the reconstruction of the translation process of the social workers, by studying how they transform the construction of "obvious harm", which is fundamentally precarious, into robust "evidence" and how they maintain assertions of the "child at risk" by drawing on constructions of parental co-operation established with the heuristic.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants