Caring Records – Setting the Record Straight: For the Rights of the Child

Caring Records: Understanding the barriers to child-centred recordkeeping in child protection

A Whyte Fund project investigating the intrinsic and embedded barriers to rights-based and child-centred recordkeeping in child protection contexts..

Caring Records is a collaboration between information management researchers in the Faculty of IT at Monash University (Associate Professor Joanne Evans and Research Fellow Barbara Reed) and child protection researchers at the Australian Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia (Research Fellow Dr Martine Hawkes). We are seeking to identify and to understand the challenges to rights-based and child-centred recordkeeping in child safety and wellbeing contexts.

This study aims to gain a better understanding of the gaps between the promotion of child-centred approaches to recordkeeping and practice. To do this, we are looking to explore current case recording and other recordkeeping practices, with a particular focus on how the cultures and practices of case recording and other recordkeeping are formed and informed.

This project hopes to share the experiences of current and former child protection practitioners, social work curriculum developers, and social work students about how they are supported in child-centred recordkeeping and their experiences, expectations, intentions and challenges regarding child-centred case recording.

Call for Participation

If you are a social work student, social work curriculum developer, or child protection/family support practitioner or case worker, then we want to hear from you. Your participation – in either an interview, focus group or survey – will help improve our understanding of how child protection and family support practitioners are prepared for case recording in their education and training, along with how child-centred recordkeeping can be better nurtured and supported. Participation in the study will be confidential, with its findings hoping to inform the design and development of better and fairer recordkeeping systems for children involved in child protection systems.

For Social work students:

Contact Dr Martine Hawkes if you are interested in participating in a focus group discussion. This will take approximately 1-2 hours and will either be held on campus or via Zoom.
OR complete our student survey by following this link: https://monash.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0kaoqMY5IJTUZYa

For Child protection/family support practitioners or case workers:

Contact Dr Martine Hawkes if you are interested in participating in an interview. The interview would take approximately 45 minutes. Interviews can be conducted in person at a location that suits you or via Zoom/telephone.
OR complete of a Practitioner/Case Worker survey by following this link: https://monash.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e9vjoCwf6oSOcd0

For Social work curriculum developers:

Contact Dr Martine Hawkes if you are interested in participating in an interview. The interview would take approximately 45 minutes. Interviews can be conducted in person at a location that suits you or via Zoom/telephone.

For more information about how you can participate, please contact the research team by email at: martine.hawkes@unisa.edu.au

The study has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee at Monash University (Application ID: 31759) and the University of South Australia (Application ID: 204524).