Decoding Narrative Statements in Child Protective Services Hotline Calls: A Methodological Approach

There is clear evidence that non-safety-related concerns abound in child protection hotline calls. In the United States, over half of Child Protective Services (CPS) calls are screened out because they do not meet criteria for a child welfare investigation. While reporter bias is one factor theorized to contribute to this level of screened out calls, the field has neither used methods that account for culturally specific socialization processes involved in bias nor analyzed hotline calls to determine if these biases were present. This paper describes cultural domain analysis (CDA) as an innovative method to inform the measurement and assessment of bias in reporters’ narratives about children and families during calls to a CPS hotline. We describe CDA, which involves a rapid interviewing technique (freelisting), a participatory method for coding (pile sorting) and how the resultant findings can be used to inform the development of a measurement framework (codebook and scale), which may be tested using recorded hotline calls. Together, these methods provide a useable framework that can help surface common and shared ways bias is conceptualized and defined in the context of CPS hotline calls. This proposed approach provides a socially valid and reliable way for measurement to make generalizable inferences across a jurisdiction. When applied in practice, data collected and analyzed from the proposed measurement framework can inform jurisdictional CPS hotline policy, practice, and training.