Hope and resilience as protective factors linked to lower burnout among child welfare workers

Abstract

Research has established that child welfare professionals regularly face workplace burnout, leading to both high turnover and reduction in service quality. Resilience has been identified as an important factor in coping with workplace burnout. However, a second construct, hope, has also been described as an important buffer to adversity and burnout. To better understand the relative role hope and resilience play in mitigating burnout among child welfare professionals, we conducted a study involving two independent samples of child welfare professionals in Oklahoma (N = 1,272). The two samples were analyzed with structural equation modeling. The model fit the data well (Χ2 = 85.11, p > .001; df = 32, RMSEA = 0.052 [90% CI: 0.039, 0.065]; CFI: 0.983; SRMR = 0.027). Moreover, both hope and resilience were found to be independent protective factors for burnout, but hope was a substantially larger predictor of lower burnout (β = −0.49; p < .001) compared to resilience (β = −0.21; p < .001). The findings suggest that attention to increasing hope in child welfare practice may be a viable intervention to reduce burnout and turnover for child welfare professionals.