Does Self-Care Really Help? a Study of Self-Care Strategies and Behaviors, Burnout, and Secondary Traumatic Stress Among Child Welfare Caseworkers

Background: Child welfare caseworkers provide direct services to vulnerable children and families dealing with complex issues (e.g., extreme poverty, trauma, and mental health). This work contributes to high levels of adverse workplace well-being outcomes, with 30%–50% of caseworkers experiencing clinical levels of burnout and secondary traumatic stress (STS). Drawing from positive psychology and preventive medicine frameworks, self-care has been emphasized as a practice that counters these challenging well-being outcomes for caseworkers and other social work professionals. Generally described as engaging in behaviors and activities that support health and well-being, there is limited research on self-care (and the use of validated self-care measures) in addressing adverse workplace well-being outcomes. Using a validated measure of self-care, this study aims to explore the association between self-care strategies and behaviors and job burnout and STS among caseworkers.

Methods: This study uses data collected in 2019 from two state and two county public child welfare agencies as part of a workforce initiative’s comprehensive organizational health assessment (COHA) effort. Self-care is measured using three self-care subscales (professional support and life balance [self-care strategies]; cognitive awareness [self-care behaviors]) from the validated Self-Care Assessment for Psychologists (Dorociak et al., 2017). The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen et al., 2005) is used to measure work and client-related job burnout and the Secondary Traumatic Stress scale (Bride et al., 2004) is used to measure STS. Three multiple regression models were conducted for client-related burnout, work-related burnout, and STS, respectively. Models included control variables (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, education) and self-care subscales (professional support, life balance, and cognitive awareness).

Results: Findings indicate that life balance (𝛽 = -.23, p <.001) and cognitive awareness (𝛽 = -.15, p <.01) are negatively related to STS. Cognitive awareness was also significantly related to client (= -18, p<.01) and work-related burnout ( -.22, p <.01). The professional support model did not yield significant results.

Conclusions: Study findings build evidence that life balance self-care strategies (i.e., I spend time with people whose company I enjoy) and cognitive awareness self-care behaviors (i.e., I am mindful of triggers that increase professional stress) potentially help to address child welfare caseworker well-being challenges. Findings also underscore the importance of using cognitive self-care practices as potential support for mitigating both job burnout and STS among caseworkers. Child welfare organizations and leadership should explore ways to support caseworkers to engage in self-care strategies and behaviors. Supporting workers to adopt selfcare practices could be a key factor in enhancing overall well-being of child welfare caseworkers and in turn, might help to reduce turnover.