Supporting the Child Protection Workforce during Reform

Background and Purpose: Child welfare systems are charged with ensuring safety, permanency, and well-being for children and families. When child fatalities occur, the response is often heightened media attention followed by reactionary system reforms. The system and its workforce are increasingly taxed during, resulting in significant turnover. Understanding how to best support the workforce during reform is important to ameliorate the unintended and negative effects of reform on turnover. This study assessed the relationship between workforce perception of support during child protection reform and intentions to remain employed. We hypothesized that several indicators of workforce perception of support during reform would form a workforce support scale, and that this scale would predict retention over and above factors commonly found in the literature.

Methods: Using a cross-sectional design, an electronic survey was sent to all child welfare front-line and supervisory staff in one mid-western state. The survey contained questions about workforce characteristics and experiences, job satisfaction, intentions to remain employed, and perceptions of support received during the reform. Most items were measured using a Likert-type scale; intent to leave was recoded into three categories, including those whose intentions were to remain employed in their current agency (“stayers”), those who planned leave child protection (“leavers”) and those who planned to remain in child protection but to seek employment in an agency other than the one in which they were currently employed (“movers”). A total of 862 individuals (44%) responded. Reliability of the support scale was assessed using Chronbach’s alpha; three hierarchical logistic regression analyses were conducted to determine whether the scale predicted intentions to remain employed after accounting for personal characteristics (gender, age, race), educational preparation (degree, Title IV-E alumni status), role within the agency (supervisor vs. frontline employee, tenure and proportion of effort devoted to child protection work, geographical region of employment), and other factors known to influence retention (perceptions of job overwhelm, professional development opportunities, peer support, supervision quality, personal safety, positive impact on clients, effects of secondary traumatic stress on work, involvement in decision making).

Results: Four items reliably described perceptions of support during reform (Chronbach’s alpha=.77), including communication by state and local child welfare agencies and advocacy by local child welfare agencies on behalf of the workforce and of children and families. This scale significantly predicted intent to remain employed in child protection, over and above other individual and system factors included in the model.

Conclusions and Implications: While intentions to stay (or leave) do not always result in corresponding actions, intentions are important indicators of workforce stability that can easily be assessed informally (e.g., in supervision) and formally (e.g., through surveys). This research solidified the fact that supports agencies offer are critical in child protection workforce retention during times of reform. Results of this study have been used to inform the state’s efforts to reduce turnover. These survey measures have been used to gauge success in the state’s endeavors over time, and reported in the state’s Annual Progress and Service Report (APSR).