How will findings be used?

The social services department had an established practice of offering additional support to clients requiring extra assistance. This encompassed:

• Initiating check-in calls with clients,

• Facilitating supplementary casework sessions, and

• Arranging extra workshops to enhance job search and skills.

Given the department’s constraints in terms of staff and financial resources, their aim was to effectively direct extra services to those in greatest need. They recognized that their current method of prioritizing such clients could be enhanced by distilling a wide range of potentially predictive information into a single “risk score.”

A few things to note:

• They did not want, nor did the project team recommend, for their decision-making process to become completely dependent on the risk scores.

• Instead, the risk scores could potentially provide a valuable piece of information (if we could validate good predictive performance and minimal bias).

• The department planned to train caseworkers in how to interpret and incorporate the risk score into their decision-making and prioritizing.

• The department also wanted to look at how risk scores varied across and within populations served by offices throughout the state. This analysis could help them understand which offices were more in need of support for reaching out to clients and for planning workshops.

This information about how the department plans to use the information can guide how we scope the predictive analytics project.

Remember, we also want to frequently check in with our ethical considerations. What ethical considerations do we want to be careful about as we proceed?