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.

Through this Whyte fund project we aimed to gain a better understanding of the gaps between the promotion of child-centred approaches to recordkeeping and practice. Through interviews with current and former child protection practitioners and social work curriculum developers, and a survey of practitioners and social work students we explored current case recording and other recordkeeping practices, with a particular focus on how cultures and practices of case recording and other recordkeeping are formed and informed.

Project Publications

• Hawkes, M., Evans, J., & Reed, B. (2024). Caring records: Professional insights into child-centered case note recording. Archival Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-023-09430-w

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).