Qualitative Social Work, 2021, Advance online publication, 13 August 2021

There are a number of decision-making conceptual frameworks that situate child protection decision-making in their organisational and social environments (Benbenishty et al., 2016; Helm and Roesch-Marsh, 2016; Whittaker, 2018). The decision-making ecology (DME) approach is one of these theoretical frameworks, developed to explain decision outcomes in child welfare. Developed by a group of US researchers, it has gained considerable traction as a framework that is complex enough to account for the range of influences on decision outcomes, conceptualising these outcomes as the result of dynamic interactions between external, organisational, individual decision-maker and case factors (Baumann et al., 2011, 2013). The DME grew out of a recognition that decision outcomes are variable in child protection, even when cases are similar, an important justice issue for children and families (Keddell, 2014). The DME proposes that variability is not only linked to differences between individual decision-makers, but also complex interactions between different parts of the child protecion system and the societies they are embedded within.

The DME also incorporates two additional useful theoretical concepts to the field of child protection decision-making: thresholds, and the GDAM – general assessment and decision making model. The concept of decision thresholds crystalises the observation that there is a decision-making continuum through which decisions proceed, but that a case must meet a particular threshold in order to escalate further into the child protecion system. At the level of individual decision-makers, judgements (the impressions formed by practitioners) must be equivalent or higher than the perceived threshold in order for a decision action to be taken, and proposes that the threshold is informed by the pracrtice experiences of decision-makers. Much DME research attempts to predict or describe thresholds. Through these elements: the four factors, thresholds and their interaction with judgements, the decision -making ecology brings a rich complexity to theorising child welfare decisions that have been drawn on by many as a framework for theory, research and practice. (Introduction). Record #7270