Compare methods

	Risk and Resilience Assessment	Child Welfare Risk Assessment
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1999	2000
Originator	Mark W. Fraser & colleagues (ecological risk-and-resilience framework)	Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner & the actuarial child-welfare risk tradition (Children's Research Center)
Type	Ecological assessment of risk and protective factors across multiple system levels	Estimation of the likelihood of future child maltreatment to guide service decisions
Seminal source	Fraser, M. W., Richman, J. M., & Galinsky, M. J. (1999). Risk, protection, and resilience: Toward a conceptual framework for social work practice. Social Work Research, 23(3), 131–143.	Baird, C., & Wagner, D. (2000). The relative validity of actuarial- and consensus-based risk assessment systems. Children and Youth Services Review, 22(11–12), 839–871.
Aliases	Risk and Protective Factors Assessment, Resilience-Based Assessment, Ecological Risk-Resilience Framework, Risk and Resilience Framework	Child Protective Services Risk Assessment, Family Risk Assessment, Actuarial Risk Assessment (Child Welfare), Risk of Future Maltreatment Assessment
Related	4	4
Summary	Risk and resilience assessment is an ecological approach to understanding why some people exposed to adversity fare poorly while others do well, by identifying the risk factors that increase the likelihood of negative outcomes and the protective factors that buffer against them, across individual, family, and environmental levels. Articulated for social work by Mark Fraser and colleagues, it shifts assessment from cataloguing deficits to weighing the dynamic balance of vulnerabilities and strengths, and uses that balance to target interventions that reduce risk and bolster protection.	Child welfare risk assessment estimates the likelihood that a child will be maltreated in the future, in order to guide decisions about case opening, service intensity, and ongoing monitoring. Actuarial systems — the most validated form, advanced by Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner, and colleagues — score a small set of empirically weighted case characteristics into a risk level that statistically predicts future maltreatment, and have been shown to outperform consensus-based clinical judgment in reliability and predictive validity. Risk assessment is distinct from, and complementary to, the safety assessment that addresses immediate danger.