CPS Time Use: Time As a Child Welfare System Resource

Background and Purpose:

Child welfare agencies experience near-constant constraints on resources while maintaining the goal of improving outcomes for the children and families they serve. Amidst those constraints, agencies, leaders, and staff are faced with questions about how to make the most of the resources available to them. One of the ways some jurisdictions pursue answers to those questions is through studies of time use. The field devotes considerable time and attention to the study of outcomes for children and families, and the process, quality, and capacity levers that are pushed or pulled in pursuit of better outcomes, but the unit of analysis is usually the child or family. Time use studies, like the one described in this abstract, place the attention on staff as a system resource.

This study aims to understand how caseworkers use their time, how time is distributed across case activities, and how case complexity influences time allocation. In this work, we hypothesize that time use varies by case characteristics and across different categories of casework activities. By observing this variation, we aim to identify opportunities for changing how time is used.

Methods:

We applied a mixed-method approach to gain a deeper understanding of the jurisdiction’s child protection practices.

First, we conducted a thorough review of the agency’s internal policy, practice, and procedure documents describing child protection casework requirements. Then, we facilitated eight focus group discussions with subject matter experts to inform survey development by establishing task time ranges.

Subsequently, we developed comprehensive time use survey, informed by focus group data, administrative data analysis, and agency leadership input. This survey encompassed hundreds of tasks across eight casework processes tailored to specific staff roles. This level of categorization allows for cross-jurisdictional comparisons of time use patterns and facilitates the examination of potential associations between time use variations, resource allocation, and case outcomes.

Results:

The time use survey in this jurisdiction revealed time use patterns among case-carrying workers and their supervisors, differentiated by type of case. Regardless of case type, workers in this jurisdiction devote the most time to aspects of the work pertaining to the completion of an initial assessment and the closing or transferring of a case. Questions on this jurisdiction’s survey also asked about time spent by workers that is not case-specific, but is time consuming nonetheless. The results indicate that case-carrying workers spend, on average, an additional week of working hours each month traveling to and attending to tasks that do not comprise their daily casework responsibilities.

Conclusions and Implications:

Case-carrying staff and their supervisors are critical to the functioning and success of a child welfare system. Understanding how staff spends time, and toward what end, offers an opportunity to make investments at the policy and practice levels in service of improving outcomes for the children and families with whom they work. Under the right conditions, time use survey results can also be linked to cost and/or outcome data for richer analyses of resource allocation and system outcomes.