Türkiye Klinikleri Adli Tıp ve Adli Bilimler Dergisi, cilt.19, sa.3, ss.165-172, 2022 (TRDizin)
Objective: The focus on decision making research has moved from rational decision-making processes to naturalistic decision making since it investigates how people make decisions in real life settings. For field professionals working with children, it is often very difficult to use rational decision-making styles due to the ever-changing social world and interactions, rather than the physical world. For this reason, decision making styles of field professionals working with children have been explored. Also it was inteded to provide an insight about factors such as empathy, anxiety and stress that might affect decision making styles. Material and Methods: One hundred eighty-eight field professionals working with children and adolescents were recruited for the study. Participants read scenarios and filled out forms to determine their decision-making styles and personality traits. Results: The findings revealed that participants employing rational decision-making styles have higher accuracy in scenarios and experience levels in terms of years significantly affects the accuracy. In terms of personality traits empathy has an effect on both rational and naturalistic decision-making styles. Conclusion: Naturalistic decision-making abilities of individuals are due to situations that are recognized by them in accordance with the literature. These abilities lead individuals to recognize schemas and patterns and also to perform mental simulations. It can be concluded that the pattern recognition partly constitutes intuitiveness, while mental simulations constitute the rational part.