When making a decision regarding the placement of a child, child welfare services also need to decide on the most appropriate care setting for the child. For children under the age of five, family-type settings, such as regular foster care placement, kinship care placement and foster care placement with a view to adopt, are generally preferred. To date, the matching process and the decision-making mechanisms that accompany the choice of an alternative setting have been the subject of very few studies, so the reasons and factors taken into account by child protection workers involved in this type of decision remain poorly known. The aim of this study is to identify, from the point of view of the child protection workers, the different factors taken in consideration when choosing the type of foster care placement for a specific child. To meet this objective, 39 semi-structured interviews were conducted with child protection workers in three distinct regions of the province of Quebec. The results paint a picture of the main factors considered by the child protection workers and show how these factors, beyond their uniqueness and their specific role in the decision-making process, are also part of an interactional dynamic, in a practice context that has its own issues.