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This article draws on an ethnographic research project that examined how New Zealand child protection social workers discussed decision making about reported risks for children. The study involved a combination of detailed interviews and observations of social work practice in social work offices from late 2002 to mid 2003. In this article, I show how the initial responses by social workers in statutory child protective services were filtered through everyday heuristics about risk as they reasoned with harm and danger probabilities. Social workers who participated in this study tended to treat risk as something that needed to be known early on in the case trajectory. By retaining a focus on what was known and recorded and, therefore, could be identified and used as the basis of interventions, social workers effectively excluded the possibility of a challenge from alternate views or positions about risk. Importantly, this approach to risk prevented social workers, their supervisors and colleagues from exploring the ways in which risk was constructed and used. Thus, they did not consider the extent to which social workers decisions, such as those to remove a child exposed families to other types of risk, to the potential harm of placing children in alternative or foster care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: In engineering risk assessments, probability is the common tool used to describe the epistemic uncertainties about unknown quantities. Probability is considered a main component of risk. However, a number of alternative approaches exist for representing and describing uncertainties in risk assessments, including possibility theory and evidence theory. For these approaches and theories a probability-based risk definition cannot in general serve as a conceptual framework for risk assessments. A broader risk perspective is required. The purpose of the present paper is to present such a perspective and show how both the probabilistic and the alternative approaches and theories can be supported by this perspective. The key feature of this perspective is that uncertainty replaces probability in the definition of risk. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]