Deeply navigating among cross-cultural issues makes you a better expert

The European Court of Human Rights underscores the importance of cultural and ethnic aspects in experts’ evaluations of child protective services cases. However, little is known about whether the degree of justification of their conclusions and the quality of expert reports differ as a function of the case’s ethnicity. We explored whether experts who examine nonethnic Scandinavian (NES) vs. ethnic Scandinavian (ES) cases differ in terms of justifying their conclusions and producing high-quality reports. A total of 306 reports (n = 124 NES) were collected after reliability testing (α ≥ 0.81) and coded for ‘Justifying’ and ‘Quality’ variables. ANOVA did not show significant differences between the NES and ES groups in terms of justification (p = 0.84), but when the NES group was divided into yes/no regarding the discussion of ethnic issues, ANOVA showed that the discussed NES group was superior in terms of justification to the not discussed NES group (p = 0.01), but not compared to the ES group (p = 0.88). For the quality variables, no differences were detected between the NES and ES groups (p ≥ 0.08). When the discussed NES group was compared with the ES group, we found a difference in the ‘quality of evaluation’ between the discussed NES group and the not discussed NES group (p = 0.02). The rating scores of the experts’ conduct and behavior did not differ. Only experts who discussed ethnic issues in their work with NES cases had higher scores on the justification and quality measures. Examining NES cases without discussing issues of ethnicity might be a risk factor for worse justification and lower quality in experts’ reports in child protective services cases.