Working Hard or Heart-y Working: Theorizing Child Protection's Occupational Construction

Background and Purpose: Reflecting concerns regarding high rates of child protection agency employee turnover, much of social work’s extant worker-focused research concentrates on the interplay among institutional, interpersonal and individual factors in child protection workers’ experiences of job satisfaction and occupational stress.The Working Hard or Heart-y Working (WHHW) project documents front-line child protection workers’ understandings of their praxis’ occupational construction.  Thus, rather than exploring child protection work from job satisfaction or retention standpoints, this project’s objectives were to engage and query worker narratives in order to better understand their experiences of the occupational forces that influence their professional identities and day-to-day practices thus privileging how workers’ view themselves (individually and collectively) relative to societal expectations and related regulatory regimes.

Methods: As an exploratory study aimed at in-depth insight and theory generation emergent from participant input about complex societal interactions, WHHW employed a constructivist grounded theory methodological approach. Participants were interviewed using a script of open-ended questions designed to illicit insights about their day-to-day practices.  WHHW’s sample was composed of 21 female workers from 6 Canadian child protection agencies who had a least one year of frontline work experience. Agencies were approached regarding worker participation but the project also benefitted from theoretical and snowball sampling.  Interviewed participants’ mean age was just under 41 years (M=40.8 years, SD=8.3) with 10 years of cumulative frontline practice experience (M=10.2 years, SD=5.2). Many interviewees reported holding multiple service roles and high levels of post-secondary educational attainment.

 Results:  First- and second-cycle coding of interview transcripts indicate that project participant reports of child protection practice can be best understood as exercises in myth-creation and -perpetuation (core category) premised on child protection worker experiences of determination, dependence and distance/dissonance/ disconnect (themes).  It is maintained that contemporary child protection practice is premised on a myth of individual worker accountability despite acknowledgement of overwhelming occupational expectations. Thus the perpetuation of the child protection system depends on workers’ continued labour within a Sisyphean occupational environment characterized by distance and disconnect between workers and those responsible for the regulatory systems they occupy. The project’s theoretical amalgam is as follows: child protection practice is total(ly) greedy institutional work premised, promulgated and rendered invisible through unintentionally complicit worker fealty to personalized occupational ideals which sustain distancing hierarchical and clientelist administrative relationships thus reinforcing systemic occupational mythology. 

Implications: This project represents a valuable addition to existing descriptions of the experiences of child protection workers, particularly with respect to providing a more nuanced understanding of child protection workers who are committed to continued service provision. While the development of skills necessary to work with children and families is an indispensable part of social work training, social work educators should perhaps consider paying more attention to organizational theory and the opportunities and constraints associated with their students’ future social work roles, not only as practitioners but also as employees.  Finally, these results indicate that workers often continue to practice despite their agency experiences, worker retention rates may rise if employers were more responsive to worker occupational concerns.