A burdened workforce: Exploring burnout, job satisfaction and turnover among child welfare caseworkers in the era of COVID-19

Abstract

Turnover in the field of child welfare is a serious concern. While turnover has been consistently associated with worker burnout, less is known about which specific types of burnout, such as personal, work-related, or client-related burnout, are most consequential for frontline workers’ intentions to stay in their workplaces and in the field of child welfare. This knowledge may provide important insights for policies to reduce turnover among child welfare professionals, an issue particularly relevant in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic when stresses placed on frontline workers may be exacerbated. The present study analyzed data from a survey of child welfare case workers (N = 258) conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine workers’ intentions to stay in the current agency and in the field of child welfare as a function of their personal, work-related, and client-related burnout and job satisfaction. Relative importance analyses and structural equation models revealed that work-related burnout, a construct capturing the burden of the work intensity, has the strongest association with intentions to leave the workplace and child welfare in general, while personal and client-related burnout also played a role. The above associations were partially mediated by job satisfaction. Implications for policy change and for future research are discussed in turn.