When Metrics Mislead: Parents’ Lived Realities in the Public Safety Net

Public sector agencies increasingly rely on data and information systems to demonstrate that they “support” families. Yet, the metrics that stand in for support are often misaligned with how they are lived. We draw on interviews with 75 parents involved in the child welfare system (CWS)—an entry point into the broader public safety net—and use an interpretive computational workflow that combines thematic coding, a small language model, and multidimensional scaling to examine parents’ accounts of support and unmet needs. We find anad hoc safety net in which formal services, public assistance, and caseworkers’ efforts are braided together with kin, peers, and employers, but in fragmented and conditional ways. Parents with robust informal networks are better positioned to appear engaged and to receive additional help, while those with few informal supports are more likely to be documented as non-compliant and experience further neglect. These patterns reveal information gaps between sociocentric metrics (e.g., referrals, completions) and parents’ egocentric outcomes (timeliness, trust, feasibility). We discuss implications for designing collaborative information systems that use narrative-rich qualitative accounts to uncover latent patterns in how support and neglect are experienced by parents in the public safety net.