Therapeutic foster care agencies provide temporary placements and a range of services to at-risk youth to help ensure their safety, permanency, and wellbeing. The practitioners that plan such care operate under heavy caseloads, limited resources, and high stakes. There is significant interest in supporting these practitioners with various technological interventions, but their work and the context around it is still poorly understood. This study aims to better understand the current assessment and treatment planning work in therapeutic foster care. We used the abstraction hierarchy modeling approach to outline the purposes, values, constraints, processes, and tools that define the workplace ecology encountered by care coordinators and clinicians from therapeutic foster care programs at Hillside, a collaborating human service organization. The resulting abstraction hierarchy was closely examined to identify areas for interventions and design implications.
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Formative Modeling of Foster Care Work: A Cognitive Work Analysis Approach
In this paper we present the promise of the Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) methodology, particularly abstraction hierarchy modeling, in the foster care domain. There is increasing interest in applying machine learning decision aids to foster care decision making, but that interest is accompanied by concerns that those aids may perpetuate systemic bias or be largely context-blind. Modeling the work conducted at different levels of the domain offers unique insights into where bias may enter the system as well as possible design implications for these future decision aids. This project models two major areas of work in the domain, management of individual cases and management of overall programs offered. These work areas are then considered in the first 3 levels of the abstraction hierarchy to display the promise that this model can hold for the domain in future work, particularly when supported with more naturalistic studies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1939579
- PAR ID:
- 10310027
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
- Volume:
- 65
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2169-5067
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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