Compare methods

	Child Safety Assessment	Structured Decision Making
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2003	1999
Originator	Child protective services practice; codified in CPS guidance and Structured Decision Making	Children's Research Center (now Evident Change); Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner & colleagues
Type	Structured determination of whether a child faces immediate serious danger	Structured assessment system standardizing key decisions across the child-welfare case process
Seminal source	Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2018). Child Protective Services: A Guide for Caseworkers. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children's Bureau.	Baird, C., Wagner, D., Healy, T., & Johnson, K. (1999). Risk assessment in child protective services: Consensus and actuarial model reliability. Child Welfare, 78(6), 723–748.
Aliases	Safety Assessment (Child Welfare), Present Danger Assessment, Child Protective Services Safety Assessment, Safety Determination	SDM, Structured Decision Making (Child Welfare), SDM System, Structured Decision-Making Model
Related	4	4
Summary	Child safety assessment is the structured process child protective services uses to decide whether a child faces immediate, serious danger and, if so, what must be done right now to protect them. Unlike risk assessment, which estimates the probability of future maltreatment, safety assessment focuses on the present: it identifies active safety threats, weighs them against the child's vulnerability and the caregivers' capacity to protect, and reaches a safe-or-unsafe determination that, when unsafe, triggers an immediate safety plan up to and including removal.	Structured Decision Making (SDM) is a child-welfare case-management system that brings consistency to the most consequential decisions in a case — whether to investigate, whether a child is safe, how high the risk of future maltreatment is, what the family needs, and whether to close — by applying a standardized, research-based assessment tool at each of these decision points. Developed by the Children's Research Center (now Evident Change) around the actuarial-risk work of Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner, and colleagues, SDM aims to reduce the wide variability and bias of unaided judgment and to target resources where they matter most.