Number of Children Placed Outside the Home as an Indicator - Social and Moral Implications of Commensuration.

The article explores what goes into one particular child indicator - children placed outside their home - and how it makes its object of description knowable and governable. This indicator is widely used in the making of social policy as a follow-up and performance indicator and is applied also in social research, including cross-national comparisons, to recognize problems and their scope, especially with reference to child welfare. The indicator is analyzed as an instance of commensuration. Commensuration produces depersonalized, public forms of knowledge that are often deemed superior to private, particularistic forms of knowledge. The work demonstrates how the category of out-of-home placement comes into being in a process wherein the particular knowledge of social workers in child welfare agencies is transformed into the macro-social knowledge embodied in the national register and, eventually, incorporated into the indicator. Hence this commensurative process renders differences as magnitude. The empirical case examined is the Finnish child indicator. The commensuration of children placed outside the home has several consequences, which shape both child protection as a social phenomenon and the understanding that the policy measures appear to require. In addition, some suggestions are made for the concrete development of the indicator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]