1 Assessing Parenting Behaviors across Racial Groups: Implications for the Child Welfare System

Black families are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system. This may in part be due to racial bias in judgments made by those who report and investigate child maltreatment. However, little is known about how race influences judgments about parenting. This article relies on data from a population-based survey to examine whether the race of interviewers, relative to the race of families they interview, influences parenting assessments. It reports evidence of racial bias in some measures of interviewer-assessed parenting behaviors. Racial bias is more pronounced for measures that require subjective assessments on the part of interviewers. 3 In 2002, approximately 12.3 of every 1,000 U.S. children were determined to have been abused or neglected (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2002). However, the inci-dence of child maltreatment is not evenly distributed. Official child maltreatment rates are consid-erably higher for black families than for white families. A large body of research indicates that, compared to white families, black families are disproportionately reported and investigated for child abuse and neglect. So too, reports are disproportionately substantiated (Courtney et al. 1996