Exploring the Child Welfare Workforce's Focus on Preserving Families Versus Saving Children: Relationships with Professional Characteristics, and Organizational Practices, and Casework Practice

Background:

Using family-centered and strengths-based approaches is best practice in child welfare casework practice (CWIG, 2025). Such an approach fundamentally emphasizes family-preserving over child saving. Yet, these values are in tension with one another and repeatedly emerge in practice and policy contexts. Few studies have examined family-preserving versus child-saving orientations in the workforce, though it could be important to understand influences on practice and potential levers for expanding family-centeredness. This research was guided by a systems framework and pragmatic approach by exploring multiple levels of influence and potential connections between beliefs and casework practice. This exploratory study’s research questions asked: (1) Does work focus vary by worker characteristics? (2) Do organizational characteristics impact work focus? (3) Does work focus relate to use of best practices in casework?

Method:

This study used a statewide survey of child welfare professionals in a Midwestern state in 2022 and 2023 (N=1,024). Surveys collected professionals’ information, including position, tenure, and licensure. To measure work focus, we used the Dalgleish scale (Dalgleish, 2010), which was scored on a continuum from family preserving (-40) to child saving (40). Organizational factors of resilience-building, safety-related, and leadership practices were measured by STS-informed organizational assessment (Sprang et al., 2017). Casework skills were measured across three domains: parent/youth engagement, safety/risk assessment and case planning, and relative/kin connections. Multiple linear regressions examined whether worker characteristics, organizational characteristics, and casework practice were related to work focus. Analyses used full-information maximum likelihood to address missing data.

Results:

Participants were employed in public and private agencies as direct staff (71%), supervisors (23%), or administrators (6%). Most participants were women (91%), white (82%), had a 4-year degree (54%), not licensed (68%), and had 10+ years’ experience (33%). We found no statistically significant difference between the year of survey and work focus. We found, compared to supervisors, direct staff were more child-saving focused (b=3.18, p=0.023) and administrators were more family-preserving focused (b=-11.99, p=0.000). Being licensed was related to family-preserving (b=-6.91, p=0.000) and having less than one year experience was associated with more child-saving focused (p=0.000). Regarding trauma-informed organizational practices, resilience-building (b=-0.06, p=0.584) and safety-related practices (b=-0.09, p=0.498) were not related to work focus; however, leadership practices were significantly associated with family-preserving focused (b=-0.19, p=0.026). Finally, we found those who endorsed use of best practices in relative/kin connections (b=-2.36, p=0.000) and strengths-based safety/risk assessments (b=-0.76, p=0.033) were related to more family-preserving focused but engagement was not significantly associated with work focus (b=0.79, p=0.392).

Implications/Conclusion:

This study’s results align with prior studies that demonstrated role and tenure are relevant to family-preserving versus child-saving orientations (e.g., Trail, 2024). However, our results offer novel insights into relationships between work focus and organizational characteristics and casework practices. While additional investigations and replication are necessary, this study suggests that values orientations relate to worker and organizational level characteristics, which may offer levers for changing attitudes and practices. Additionally, family-preserving orientations were related to key best practices. Future research should expand upon this study with deeper investigations of values orientation, practices, and family outcomes.