How do Mandated Reporters Feel about the System They're Required to Be a Part of?
By Kathryn S. Krase, PhD JD MSW
A project of Krase Consulting
Part 1 in a series on research into mandated reporters' opinions of mandated reporting and child protective services.
Mandated reporters are people required to make reports to child protective services (CPS) in their given state. We read and hear a lot about what mandated reporters are supposed to do and when. What we read and hear about far less is what mandated reporters actually think about the policy of mandated reporting, the system that reports are made into, and how the role of mandated reporter actually impacts the reporter, personally and professionally.
Interest in learning more about the experiences of mandated reporters was the starting point for a study I conducted with three colleagues — Dr. Latoya Attis, Dr. Emily Murphy, and Michelle Desir, LCSW. We surveyed nearly 400 mandated reporters across the country: mental health professionals, medical providers, educators, social service workers, child welfare staff, and more.
We asked their opinions about mandated reporting. We asked about their confidence in their role as mandated reporters. We asked them to explore case examples and evaluate them.
The findings related to the opinions of mandated reporters was the subject of our first research article currently under peer review with Children and Youth Services Review.
Over the next several blog posts I'll walk through what we found about the opinions of mandated reporters, and why the opinions of mandated reporters are important.
This current post is an overview — the map for the series.
About the Research
Before getting into what we found, it's worth spending a minute on how we found it, since it shapes how much weight the findings can carry.
Who we surveyed. 386 professionals across the country who identify as “mandated reporters” were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling — outreach through our own professional and personal networks, social media, and professional listservs and organizations.
Our method of finding participants for this research means the resulting sample is NOT a random, nationally representative sample. Respondents to our survey skewed White (58.8%), female (67.6%), and highly educated (84% held a master's degree or higher). Mental health professionals made up over half the sample (55.2%), with social service providers (26.7%), child welfare workers (14.8%), medical professionals (14.2%), educators (11.9%), legal professionals (4.4%), and child care providers (2.8%) also represented.
Many respondents actually identified with more than one professional category. Ages ranged from 22 to 83 (average 44.5). Just under half of survey respondents (48%) are parents themselves.
How we asked. The survey was built and administered anonymously online through an online survey program, Qualtrics. The survey was available during October and November 2024, and took about ten minutes to complete. The research was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) before launching, ensuring that we took appropriate steps to protect participants.
Survey participants gave informed consent. Their participation was anonymous. We did not collect names or contact information.
What we asked. We asked MANY questions!!! But our first article focuses on six statements related to the opinions of mandated reporters.
Participants were asked to rate each of the following statements on a 5-point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree:
"Mandated reporting is a good policy"
"CPS protects children"
"CPS helps families"
"Being a mandated reporter complicates relationships with my clients"
"I am worried that a parent will be angry if I make a report to CPS"
"I am afraid if I don't make a report to CPS I will get in trouble"
Alongside those six items, we collected each respondent's professional role, their reporting history (how often they made a report to CPS, and — for anyone who had — what motivated the decision). Three true/false questions tested their actual knowledge of how the CPS system works. We also asked how satisfied they were with the mandated reporter training they'd received, whether they'd ever personally been the subject of a CPS report, and standard demographics.
Collecting data on these variables helps us move beyond “how do people feel” to “what predicts how people feel.” That is the main focus of this series.
The Headline Numbers
Here's how mandated reporters in our sample responded to the six opinion statements, ranked from most to least agreement:
65.3% agreed that mandated reporting is a good policy
56.5% agreed they're afraid of professional or legal consequences if they fail to report
51.0% agreed that being a mandated reporter complicates their relationships with clients
50.3% agreed that CPS protects children
49.0% agreed they worry a parent will be angry if they make a report
41.6% agreed that CPS helps families
Sit with that ordering for a second. The statement mandated reporters agreed with most was that the policy itself is sound. The statement they agreed with least was that the system the policy feeds into actually helps the families it touches. That gap — support for the mandate alongside real doubt about what the mandate accomplishes — is the tension I’m really interested in exploring: the tension between obligation and doubt.
Two Important Patterns
When we looked at how these six opinions related to one another statistically, a clear pattern emerged. They split into two groups that move in opposite directions:
Confidence in CPS effectiveness
Opinions about mandated reporting as a good policy, as well as opinions about whether CPS protects and/or helps, track together closely. In fact, "CPS protects children" and "CPS helps families" were the two most tightly linked/correlated variables in the entire study (r = .751) — if a reporter believes one, they almost certainly believe the other. This looks less like three separate opinions and more like one underlying belief: does the system work?
Concern about personal and relational cost
Opinions about whether mandated reporting complicates the professional role are related to feeling worried about how parents will respond to a report, and being afraid of getting in trouble if you don’t report. These three variables move up and down together, AND they move in the opposite direction from the effectiveness items. The more a reporter worries about a parent's anger or their own legal exposure, the less likely they are to believe the system is protective, helpful, or well-designed.
Almost nobody in our sample scored high on both dimensions or low on both. Reporters tend to land somewhere on a spectrum between "I believe in this system" and "I'm doing this because I have to, and I'm not sure it helps." Understanding why people land where they do — what pushes someone toward confidence versus doubt — is what the rest of this series digs into.
What's coming in this series
Is Mandated Reporting Good Policy? It Depends Who You Ask — who supports the policy a lot or less, and who doesn't support it at all.
Does CPS Actually Protect Children and Help Families? — exploring the correlation between these two, and how these two beliefs are really one belief
The Professional Cost of Being a Mandated Reporter — the role's clearest divide: which professionals feel the strain of reporting on client relationships, and which don't
What Mandated Reporters Are Afraid Of — fear of a parent's anger versus fear of legal trouble, and why they're not the same fear
The Knowledge Paradox: The Most Informed Reporters Are the Most Skeptical — the single most interesting finding in the study, IMHO
Training Satisfaction: The One Lever That Moves A Lot — the strongest, most consistent predictor across all six outcomes, and what that means for people like me, who train mandated reporters
The Mental Health Professional Effect — why the largest professional group in our sample is also the most consistently skeptical
What This Means for Training, Supervision, and Policy — practical takeaways for agencies, supervisors, and trainers
Each post will unpack one piece of the picture using the actual numbers from the study — bivariate comparisons, and what survives once we control for demographics including professional role, system knowledge, and reporting history all at once. My hope is that by the end of the series, you'll have a much clearer sense not just of what mandated reporters believe, but why — and what that means for how we train and support the professionals in this role, and why we need policy change NOW.
This research is co-authored with Dr. Latoya Attis (Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University), Dr. Emily Murphy (School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Mercy University), and Michelle Desir, LCSW (Silbermann School of Social Work, Hunter College). A preprint of our research study is available on SSRN; the paper is currently under peer review at Children and Youth Services Review, and findings discussed in this series should be considered preliminary until publication. This research was supported by Children's Rights, Inc.
If this research resonates with you, consider learning more about the New York Mandated Reporting Working Group — a coalition of advocates, professionals, and impacted individuals — working towards a trust-based approach to service to children and families that better supports families and strengthens their stability and well-being. Learn more at https://www.nymrwg.org/
Cite this blog:
Krase, K. (2026, Month Day). How do Mandated Reporters Feel about the System They're Required to Be a Part of? Krase Consulting Blog. LINK HERE
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