Compare methods

	Structured Decision Making	Child Welfare Risk Assessment
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1999	2000
Originator	Children's Research Center (now Evident Change); Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner & colleagues	Christopher Baird, Dennis Wagner & the actuarial child-welfare risk tradition (Children's Research Center)
Type	Structured assessment system standardizing key decisions across the child-welfare case process	Estimation of the likelihood of future child maltreatment to guide service decisions
Seminal source	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.	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	SDM, Structured Decision Making (Child Welfare), SDM System, Structured Decision-Making Model	Child Protective Services Risk Assessment, Family Risk Assessment, Actuarial Risk Assessment (Child Welfare), Risk of Future Maltreatment Assessment
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.