Worker Characteristics and the Decision to Place and out-of-Home Care: Evidence Beyond Case Characteristics

Background and Purpose. When new initiatives are implemented and evaluated, it is important to consider both the environment in which the changes are taking place and the characteristics of the people responsible for the desired change. Thus, in order to understand the implementation context of a southeastern state participating in a Title IV-E Waiver initiative, a staff survey examining demographic, attitudinal, and organizational culture and climate features was administered, once at baseline and again a year and half later. Results from the survey were examined in relationship to outcomes of interest in order to understand the extent to which worker characteristics were associated with outcomes used to evaluate the success of the intervention.

Methods: An online General Staff Survey was administered twice across four regions within a southeastern state to both custodial and non-custodial workers, once in 2015 and then again in 2017. Overall responses rates for the first round were 65% and for the second, involving a larger pool of staff, were 79%. The survey employed scales measuring whether or not one had a social work degree, attitudes about family preservation, child safety, perceptions of workload, organizational culture and climate, child welfare tenure, concerns about liability and so forth. Worker and agency characteristics data from 226 non-custodial workers were then linked at the worker-level to 67,828 child-CPS response level administrative data reflecting case characteristics of children (e.g., age, type of CPS response received [e.g., investigations or assessments], spells in out-of-home care and re-referrals) whose first contact with the system occurred between 2009 and 2016.

Results: Bivariate analyses indicate that on average, staff without a social work degree and those with fewer years in child welfare favored child safety over family preservation while scores for staff with social work degrees and those with more years in child welfare scores were more neutral, or favored family preservation (respectively). Multilevel analyses indicate that in addition to child characteristics and regional variations, characteristics of the assigned workers are associated with the odds of placement in out-of-home care.  Specifically, factors such as whether or not a caseworker had a social work degree, where they fell on a spectrum of child safety vs. family preservation beliefs, their perceptions of organizational culture and climate, confidence in local services, tenure with the child welfare agency, and other beliefs affected the odds of a decision to place a child in out-of-home care.

Conclusions and Implications:  The results of this study suggest that child welfare workers’ personal attitudes and characteristics have associations with the decision to place a child in out-of-home care, a finding that offers insights into and has implications for workforce interventions and implementation concerns including selection, staff development, performance monitoring, staff retention, and quality improvement.