Disseminating New Initiatives in Child Welfare Agencies: Social Workers' Perception of Implementation

Background and Purpose: There are many important and promising initiatives introduced to child welfare agencies because of their ability to address various risks experienced by vulnerable youth at scale. Although the efficacy of these programs are examined, external validity is a limitation in many these studies because the studies are conducted in clinical settings. With so many agencies being both the recipients and providers of new programs that serve youth, research on dissemination in the child welfare environment is critical. 

 

This paper helps to illuminate dissemination of new initiatives by examining the retrospective accounts of social workers whose agency has been introduced to a new trauma screening tool. Additionally, participants offer suggestions on ways to deliver new programs in child welfare. 

 

Methods: Sixty-one in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with social workers and supervisors from all functions of child welfare (CPS, in-home services, foster care, adoptions, etc.) as well as some program managers/administrators, and one deputy director of the department of social services. The sample was predominantly front-line social workers (60.7% front-line social workers). Nine counties volunteered to take part in the pilot program to introduce and disseminate a trauma screening tool to identify possible trauma in their child welfare youth. A team of mostly volunteers took part in training on trauma. Dissemination of the information from the core team members to the rest of the agency varied by county. Interviewees were chosen from the pilot agencies at random by researchers. Interviews were professionally transcribed verbatim then coded thematically using Dedoose qualitative software, guided by the principles of grounded theory and an inductive approach to qualitative analysis. 
 

Findings: Most of the interviewees (78.7%) had at least some experience with the screening tool (21.3% of the interviewees had none). Four of the counties screened all children in both their CPS and foster care units. The other counties had variations of all or some of their children in CPS and/or foster care units. Most participants had a positive assessment of the trauma screening tool because of the perceived value of the screening tool to their work. Most of the participants noted that although the trauma training was given to foster care workers, the counties expanded the use to the investigative units. Because this expansion was not planned, many of the investigators were not formally trained by state trainers. This resulted in limited dissemination and variability in the fidelity of the initiative. Social workers reported that having champions within the agency was important. They also said that hearing examples of success stories by their own peers were critical in buying into the initiative. 

 

Conclusion and Implication: Findings provide insight into considerations when introducing a new intervention to child welfare agencies. Planning where in the agency the intervention should be targeted to is also important. The study also raises questions on top-down versus bottom-up design in a highly hierarchical child welfare setting.