Surfacing and Ranking the Forces That Shape Frontline Practice: A Step-by-Step Force Field Analysis Within a Quasi-Delphi Design for Assessing Risk Assessment and Decision-Making Among Child Protective Services Workers

Frontline child protective services (CPS) workers make consequential safety decisions under time pressure, with incomplete information, and amid high public scrutiny (Saxena & Guha, 2024). Yet the forces practitioners perceive as driving or impeding effective practice are inconsistently captured in research. This article presents a replicable, step-by-step methodological framework that combines Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis (Lewin, 1947) with a two-round quasi-Delphi design (Cuhls, 2023) to surface, name, and rank the driving and restraining forces that shape risk assessment and decision-making in child welfare. The framework is organized into four phases and twelve steps: design and preparation; a Round 1 open-ended elicitation analyzed through inductive content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005); a Round 2 ranking by an independent practitioner panel; and aggregation, force field construction, prioritization, and dissemination. Each step is illustrated with a worked example drawn from a study of CPS workers’ risk assessment and placement decision-making for young children (Landress, 2024). In that study, support systems (M = 4.62) emerged as the strongest driving force for decision-making, and system inefficiencies (M = 4.29) as the strongest restraining force. Interagency collaboration and communication appeared as dual-valence forces within risk management, ranking first among driving forces (M = 4.50) and second among restraining forces (M = 3.38). The article concludes with a reporting checklist to support transparent replication. The framework offers researchers, administrators, and quality-improvement teams a low-cost, practitioner-centered method for identifying high-leverage intervention targets.