Assessing Child Maintenance Cases in Ghana: What Do Social Workers Consider?

Cudjoe, Ebenezer, Abdullah, Alhassan, Frimpong-Manso, Kwabena, Agbadi, Pascal, and Deliege, Antoine (2025) Assessing Child Maintenance Cases in Ghana: What Do Social Workers Consider? Journal of Social Service Research, 51 (2). pp. 364-377.

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Abstract

While one of the key responsibilities of social services in Ghana is to conduct maintenance arrangements so that the nonresident parent is committed to making financial contributions to the well-being of the child, little is known about what informs social workers’ assessments in child maintenance cases. The aim of this study was to determine what social workers consider when undertaking child maintenance assessments. A qualitative practice research study was conducted with 13 social workers and 12 parents involved in a child maintenance case with three agencies of the Department of Social Welfare and Community Development in Ghana. The study showed that corroborating the existence of nonpayment for maintenance in the family is the first step in assessing other factors, such as the parent’s income, occupational status and maintenance amount. Even after the maintenance amount was decided upon, social workers were often unable to follow-up on nonresident parents to ensure that they complied with the maintenance arrangements. Given that no assessment instrument exists in Ghana for addressing child maintenance cases, the study’s findings can provide useful information that can aid in the development of an instrument or framework to assist social workers in their assessments.

Item ID: 88926
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 1540-7314
Keywords: Child maintenance, child maintenance assessment, Ghana, nonresident parents, social workers
Copyright Information: © 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Date Deposited: 08 Oct 2025 03:04
FoR Codes: 44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4409 Social work > 440902 Counselling, wellbeing and community services @ 100%
SEO Codes: 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280123 Expanding knowledge in human society @ 100%
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