Bureaucratic intermediaries sometimes turn to the state to mobilize legal action on behalf of other people in a non-criminal context. This asks how and under what conditions, state workers decide to go to the legal system instead of the social service system in their casework? Based on in-depth interviews with state workers in multiple locales, this study examines how workers decide to guide families through state processes. The research design pays particular attention to how decisions are made in the context of tools designed to guide action in casework. This work brings together the concept of legal mobilization and concepts concerning the significance of quantification in state decisionmaking, the process by which numbers come to define outcomes and determine policy in order to produce new knowledge about socio-legal decision-making. This research seeks to inform policy and practice and more broadly examines the policy implications of protocols that rely on actuarial risk models to standardize complex decisions and their outcomes. Research in this area has the potential to generate findings that will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines by connecting work on law and society, intervention research, social service systems, and the use of actuarial risk models to one another. Understanding the meaning-making process for these decisions is critical for clarifying how important policy debates about the utility of different approaches to social problems play out on the ground.
Because this project will be working with state decisionmakers, it will inform policy by returning the outcomes of the research to policymakers and caseworkers. In addition, it will contribute to training in social science methods for both undergraduates and a graduate student.
