Which children are of concern? Process and challenges of identifying child welfare issues from the perspective of practitioners

Abstract Early identification of children facing welfare-related concerns is essential for providing timely and appropriate support. In real-world settings, however, challenges such as maltreatment, poverty, and disability often overlap and interact, complicating both recognition and interpretation. This qualitative study investigates how practitioners—teachers, school social workers (SSWs), and nonprofit organization (NPO) staff—engage in early identification within such complex environments, and what obstacles they encounter. Based on semi-structured interviews with 41 practitioners in Japan, thematic analysis revealed two main processes involved in recognition: gathering fragmentary information and interpreting that information to infer underlying welfare concerns. Practitioners collected subtle cues through observation and everyday conversation and interpreted them either by referencing familiar case patterns or by forming hypotheses from multiple angles. The study identified two types of challenges: structural barriers (e.g. limited communication across roles, children’s reluctance to disclose problems) and individual-level difficulties (e.g. low perceptual sensitivity, reliance on intuitive categorizations, and difficulty generating interpretive explanations). By clarifying both the process and the limitations involved in recognizing children with overlapping welfare concerns, this study contributes to understanding how recognition unfolds in practice and highlights the need to strengthen interpretive capacity in practitioner training.