Darcey H Merritt

Dr. Darcey Merritt is a Professor at the University of Chicago, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. She has extensive experience as a practitioner in private and public child welfare systems, and her empirical scholarship is meaningfully informed by the lived experiences of those impacted by child welfare systems. Her research portfolio centers on child maltreatment prevention, specifically neglect, and parenting in socio-economic context, considering the impact of working memory on parental decision-making. She is dedicated to elevating the voices of systems-impacted parents and children in the discussion of prevention methods and service delivery in the context of systemic racism and racialized poverty.

Her published work primarily focuses on child welfare service-impacted families and their perceived experiences while receiving services, contextual (e.g. neighborhood and psychosocial) indicators of well-being outcomes, the structural and systemic impact of child welfare oversight on parenting, children’s preferences and expectations for permanency while living in out of home placements, ways in which systemic racism manifests within child welfare system service delivery, and child developmental and well-being outcomes in the context of socio-behavioral, relational and neighborhood level factors.

Her most innovative scope of research, An Elicitation Analysis of Parental Perspectives Regarding Child Neglect, (funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NICHD, NIH) is a study designed to elicit the parental decision-making processes that result in behaviors typically deemed neglectful by child welfare service providers. This work has laid the groundwork for subsequent studies that include systems-impacted parents at every step of the research design process to reimagine and inform practitioners and policymakers of the traumatic impact of child and family oversight surveillance, a primary component of the child protection system. Further, her work centers families of color who have experienced racialized poverty throughout service receipt to advance the discussion about reimagining the purpose of child welfare systems and mitigating the traumatic impact and myriad poor long-term outcomes on family well-being.

Merritt is nationally and internationally recognized for her expertise in child welfare, and she has presented research and provided guidance on child protective services design and supports for vulnerable families in China, Abu Dhabi, and across the United States. She presented a keynote at the International Conference on Social Work for Children: Practice in China and Global Experience in Beijing at the invitation of UNICEF’s China Office, and the endowed 15th Brieland Visiting Scholar Lecture, titled, Centering the Lived Experiences and Voices of Black Moms Impacted by Child Welfare Systems Surveillance at the University of Illinois School of Social Work. 

Merritt is a Research Affiliate, Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is also a Co-Editor in Chief for Children and Youth Services Review (CYSR), a member of the editorial board for Child Maltreatment, and Social Service Review, a Board member of the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), Citizens’ Committee for Children of NY (CCC), American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC), and Social Work Democracy Project (SWDP). Dr. Merritt earned her MSW and PhD in social welfare from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare, and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College with concentrations in sociology and psychology. Her published work can be found at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Darcey-Merritt-2