Anne Marie Villumsen

In this scoping review, we aim to study the decision‐making process regarding referrals concerning children and families at risk within child protection and child welfare systems. Particularly, we focus on the decision made immediately after receiving the referral. We conducted two rounds of searches across 17 different databases. We used 17 and 19 different terms translated into four languages respectively. Twenty‐seven articles were included within a period of 14 years. After describing the field following the type of social service system and geography, the decision‐making ecology (DME) framework was applied. The issue of decision‐making in social service is complex. Overall, the results showed that the field is somewhat well studied, methodologically and thematically, showing an overweight of studies conducted in the UK and the USA, indicating a need for more research in Nordic child and family welfare systems. We argue that decision‐making regarding referrals is a context‐bound phenomenon with mainly external factors, such as types of social service systems, and organisational factors, as substantial influences to decision‐making. Overall, this calls for more local and context‐bound research in each country and across organisational boundaries within the same country if we want to know what affects the decisions made immediately after receiving a referral and thereby gaining important knowledge on the safeguarding of children and families at risk.