A vignette study examining how ethnicity affects social workers assessments in child protection cases

At the current time Sweden is, like many other countries, characterized by a variation of different cultural and ethnical groups. Previous research has concluded that there are some difficulties among social workers who work with child protection cases to identify whether something is child abuse or whether it is the upbringing influenced by the culture within the ethnical group. How child protection cases with families of a foreign ethnicity is treated in relation to child protection cases with families of a Swedish ethnicity is therefor of interest – as well as this study’s primary inquiry. To find answers to this, two different vignettes were created where the only significant difference were the families’ names. In the first vignette the name of the family was of Swedish ethnicity, and in the second the name of the family was of foreign ethnicity. The vignettes were sent in the form of web surveys to social workers who work with child protection cases. The surveys were answered by 17 respectively 22 social workers. The result was then presented in the form of descriptive statistics and a thematic analysis. It showed more similarities than differences in the social workers assessments. The few differences that could be identified were found mainly in the way the social workers categorized their concern for the child