Child Welfare Organizations Research Articles

Editorial: Touchstones of Hope: Still the best guide for Indigenous child welfare

Editorial: Touchstones of Hope: Still the best guide for Indigenous child welfare. Un article de la revue First Peoples Child & Family Review (Special Issue: 10th Anniversary of the Touchstones of Hope for Indigenous Children, Youth, and Families) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Exploring patterns of employee psychosocial outcomes among child welfare workers

Child welfare workers continue to suffer from increased levels of job stress and burnout, often resulting in an intention to leave. Although the literature on these psychosocial employee outcomes is extensive, much of it is limited in that it has failed to determine if variability exists across these constructs in a way that can be systematically categorized. This cross sectional exploratory study utilized a statewide purposive sample of respondents (N=209) from a public child welfare organization in a Northeastern state. Two complementary cluster methods and discriminant function analysis were used to determine if subtypes of job stress, burnout, well-being, job satisfaction and intent to leave exist among public child welfare workers. Since the results yielded three different clusters of workers, an Analysis of Variance was used to identify significant group differences, while Scheffé post hoc tests were examined to determine which groups differed. Findings show that the all three clusters significantly vary from one another in terms of the adverse employee psychosocial outcomes. Our findings suggest that child welfare workers represent a heterogeneous group with dissimilar psychosocial needs. To meet those employee needs and maximize their work output, child welfare administrators should make a concerted effort to better understand the unique needs of this strained workforce.

Supporting user involvement in child welfare work: a way of implementing evidence-based practice

The article describes and analyses some preliminary working methods for user involvement in child welfare. The models are based on the results of a national project in Sweden where children and young people have been involved as informants. How experiences and viewpoints from children and young people can be a source of knowledge in child welfare organisations is one of the main questions. The performance and the results of the project are analysed in relation to a theoretical macro-oriented model created to illustrate the need for different kinds of knowledge in supporting the implementation of an evidence-based practice.

Approaches to evaluation in Australian child and family welfare organizations

Child and family welfare organizations around the world aspire to achieve missions that will improve outcomes for vulnerable children and families and ultimately reduce the prevalence and impact of child maltreatment. In Australia, this work is currently being influenced by an increasingly turbulent political and economic climate; one that is requiring organizations to engage with evaluation in new and advanced ways so that they are not left behind in the increasingly complex and competitive environment that they now operate in. Despite the apparent awareness and understanding of the essential place of evaluation in quality and effective service delivery, it is also understood that evaluation of the human services work that child and family welfare organizations undertake is extremely challenging due to its intricate, ever-changing and often innovative nature. Embedding evaluation within such organizations therefore requires a tailored and planned decision-making and implementation process. This paper will briefly describe the recent socio-political history and environment that Australian child and family welfare organizations operate in and how this has impacted on engagement with evaluation. With consideration to this, it will describe the evaluation approaches available to organizations and the factors that may influence selection of a specific approach. It will then explore the benefits and challenges of these evaluation approaches, and consider the implications for child and family welfare agencies more broadly.

Support in the Workplace: Buffering the Deleterious Effects of Work–Family Conflict on Child Welfare Workers’ Well-Being and Job Burnout

ABSTRACTWe examined the impact of work–family conflict (WFC) on worker well-being and job burnout, as well as the role of social support in the workplace as a potential buffer against the influence of WFC. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses in a cross-sectional sample of 361 public child welfare workers indicate that WFC was related to reduced well-being and increased job burnout, whereas supervisory support moderated the relationship between WFC and well-being. Findings from this study hold implications to workforce management practices aimed at improving worker well-being in human service and child welfare organizations. Human resource management policies designed to manage worker schedules should aim to facilitate workers’ ability to meet work and family demands through programs such as flexible work schedules and telecommuting. Recommendations for future research on WFC and worker well-being are discussed.

Organizational change: The role of climate and job satisfaction in child welfare workers' perception of readiness for change

When organizations embark on deliberate efforts to increase effectiveness through organizational-level changes, those that demonstrate greater readiness for change tend to have better outcomes. In contrast, when the organization is not ready, a change effort may result in resistance, conflict and, eventually, failure. However, studies addressing how agency climate and job satisfaction influence workers' perception of the organization's readiness for change in child welfare or human service organizations are scarce. Data for this study was obtained from a sample of 356 direct care and clinical child welfare workers employed at eight not-for-profit child welfare agencies under contract to provide a variety of services in a large northeastern state. Workers were surveyed on their agency's readiness for change, organizational climate, and job satisfaction. The Spector Job Satisfaction Survey measured nine subscales and Parker Organizational Climate survey measured four primary domains: role, job, supervision, and organizational dimensions. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on nine questions derived from the Organizational Readiness for Change survey that measured workers' perceptions of organizational readiness for change. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was utilized to determine climate and satisfaction influences on voluntary child welfare workers' readiness for change. The results of SEM confirmed that the exogenous independent indicators of role ambiguity, supervisor goal emphasis, organizational innovation, satisfaction with communication, and the number of years in current position were predictive of workers' perception of readiness for change with significant positive coefficients. This study highlights the importance of certain organizational climate and job satisfaction factors that child welfare workers' identify for the success of agency change efforts. Workers perceive that organizations may have a higher level of readiness to implement successful change initiatives when: (1) workers feel their role is clear, supervisors articulate change goals, and job performance is held to a high standard and is measurable; (2) agency leaders establish organizational communication that is explicate, and they encourage workers to develop ideas and try new ways of doing the job; and (3) the greater the number of years workers are in their current position, the more likely change initiatives are perceived to be successful. Most importantly, this study suggests that not all organizational climate or job satisfaction factors are recognized by workers as supporting change equally. • 356 non-profit direct care and clinical child welfare workers were sampled. • Does agency climate & job satisfaction influence readiness for change? • Structural Equation Modeling confirmed workers' perception. • Climate: role clarity, supervisor goal emphasis, organizational innovation • Job satisfaction: satisfaction with agency-wide communication

When the Paradoxical is Ideal: Employees' Perceptions of Their Organizations, Work Units, and Ideal Workplaces

A multidimensional agency assessment instrument designed to assist administrators who are interested in engaging in the process of planned organizational change was tested in this study. A sample of workers playing a variety of helping roles within two social service organizations—one large public child welfare organization and one private nonprofit community-based organization—completed the instrument. Findings were consistent with the previous piloting of the instrument, demonstrating that organizations operate within cultures based in paradoxical assumptions.

Organizational tenure among child welfare workers, burnout, stress, and intent to leave: Does employment-based social capital make a difference?

Abstract Research has shown that child welfare organizations have a prominent role in safeguarding their workers from experiencing high levels of job stress and burnout, which can ultimately lead to increased thoughts of leaving. However, it is not clear whether these relationships are shaped by their length of organizational tenure. A cross-sectional research design that included a statewide purposive sample of 209 child welfare workers was used to test a theoretical model of employment-based social capital to examine how paths to job stress, burnout, and intent to leave differ between workers who have worked in a child welfare organization for less than 3 years compared to those with 3 years or more of employment in one organization. Path analysis results indicate that when a mixture of dimensions of employment-based social capital are present, they act as significant direct protective factors in decreasing job stress and indirectly shape burnout and intent to leave differently based on organizational tenure. Thus, organizations may have to institute unique intervention efforts for both sets of workers that provide immediate and long-term structures of support, resources, and organizational practices given that their group-specific needs may change over time.

Organizational factors and child participation in decision‐making: differences between two child welfare organizations

AbstractChildren in residential care tend to be less content with the quality of care arrangements and participation opportunities compared to children in foster care. This study explored possible differences in social workers' views about child participation and service quality. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test if any differences may be explained by collaboration between professionals' and social workers' work engagement. We found that social workers from residential care services seem more prudent in letting children participate in case planning compared to social workers planning for foster care. Social workers' judgements of service quality were also highly affected by their organizational affiliation, but personal factors such as work engagement may also play a part. The differences we found regarding social workers' attitudes towards participation and their rating of service quality are associated with organizational culture. Understanding how organizations shape social workers' decisions to include or exclude children in care planning may help gain a more comprehensive understanding of what is needed to take the participation agenda forward.

Remembering the "Forgotten Child": The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s

Remembering the "Forgotten Child":The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s Margaret D. Jacobs (bio) On Christmas Day 1975, Marcia Marie Summers was born to Charlene Summers, a member and resident of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in North Dakota. A few months later, a white couple from Indiana approached the young mother and offered to care for her infant while Summers attended school. (Just two months before, the couple had filed an adoption petition in the Standing Rock Tribal Court for another Indian child, but the court had denied their request.) Assuming she was making a temporary arrangement, Summers agreed and signed a document giving the Indiana couple power of attorney over Marcia Marie in parent-child-related actions. Immediately, the couple departed with the baby from the reservation and returned to Indiana. Summers realized that the couple intended to permanently adopt her daughter, so she asked the Standing Rock Tribal Court to intervene. When the couple ignored the tribal court's order to return the child to her mother, Summers and tribal authorities requested the help of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA). Their attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus on Summers's behalf in the Washington County, Indiana, Circuit Court, and the judge ordered Marcia Marie returned to her mother, noting the tribe's exclusive jurisdiction in the case.1 Like Summers, in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of other American Indian parents, grandparents, and caretakers suffered the removal of their children and their placement in non-Indian foster or adoptive homes. Unlike Summers, however, many Indian families struggled for years to regain their children, and some were never able to effect their return. By the late 1960s, many Indian tribes had become deeply troubled by this practice. In 1968, having endured an inordinate number of [End Page 136] such cases, the Devils Lake (now Spirit Lake) Sioux Tribe of North Dakota requested that the AAIA conduct an investigation into the practice. The AAIA found that of 1,100 Devils Lake Sioux Indians under twenty-one years of age living on the Fort Totten reservation, 275, or 25 percent, had been separated from their families.2 Suspecting that this practice devastated other Indian communities as well, the AAIA engaged in a painstaking process to amass similar data from state social services agencies and private placement agencies across the nation. They discovered that in most states with large American Indian populations, 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families and placed in foster or adoptive homes or in institutions at a per capita rate far higher than that of non-Indian children.3 How did it come to pass that the fostering and adoption of Indian children outside their families and communities had reached these crisis proportions by the late 1960s? State welfare authorities and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials alleged a dramatic rise in unmarried Indian mothers with unwanted children and claimed that many Indian individuals and families lacked the resources and skills to properly care for their own children. Claiming to be concerned with the best interests of the Indian child, the BIA promoted the increased fostering and adoption of Indian children in non-Indian families. Indian families and their advocates charged instead that many social workers were using ethnocentric and middle-class criteria to unnecessarily remove Indian children from their families and communities. Through creating their own child welfare organizations and legal codes, as well as working for the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), Indian activists and their allies sought to bring Indian child welfare under the control of Indian nations. Given the shockingly high estimates of Indian children who were fostered or adopted outside their communities, surprisingly little historical research has been done on this topic. Most of the scholarship on Indian adoption has been in the fields of sociology, psychology, social work, and law. It has included outcomes studies and oral histories of adopted Indian children, debates about social work practice, and examinations of the new legal framework created by the passage of ICWA in 1978.4 Historians of American adoption have briefly mentioned Indian adoption, but they have generally subsumed...

Designing Evaluations in Child Welfare Organizations: An Approach for Administrators

Evaluations in child welfare settings present challenges and opportunities for administrators. This paper presents a framework for considering such evaluations and proposes mixed methods to assess participatory interventions for sustainable organizational change. A progression of three studies illustrates this approach and draws on results to demonstrate how evaluation designs impact findings.

Exploring workforce retention in child and family social work

Child and family social work in the United Kingdom is facing a staff recruitment and retention crisis in many areas. Occupational stress, burnout, heavy workloads and insufficient resources combine to make the social work role highly demanding and unattractive to prospective recruits. This paper explores one approach to the problem which synthesises Giddens’ philosophical ideas on discursive consciousness, Habermas’ precepts on moral discourse, Boal’s use of empowering theatre and Lewin’s rendition of the action research cycle. These theoretical, philosophical and methodological components, when combined, offer a radically different approach to staff retention strategies within child welfare organisations by centring on the transformative power of human agency. It is concluded that the approach described can be extrapolated to the management of other human service professions experiencing similar recruitment and retention difficulties.

Placement decisions and disparities among Aboriginal children: Further analysis of the Canadian incidence study of reported child abuse and neglect part A: Comparisons of the 1998 and 2003 surveys

ObjectiveFluke et al. (2010) analyzed Canadian Incidence Study on Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS) data collected in 1998 to explore the influence of clinical and organizational characteristics on the decision to place Aboriginal children in an out-of-home placement at the conclusion of a child maltreatment investigation. This study explores this same question using CIS data collected in 2003 which included a larger sample of Aboriginal children and First Nations child and family service agencies. MethodsThe decision to place a child in an out-of-home placement was examined using data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect-2003 and a reanalysis of CIS-1998 data (Fluke et al., 2010). The CIS-2003 dataset includes information on nearly 12,000 child maltreatment investigations from the time of report to case disposition. The CIS-2003 also captures information on the characteristics of investigating workers and the child welfare organizations for which they work. Multi-level statistical models were developed to analyze the influence of clinical and organizational variables using MPlus software. MPlus allows the use of dichotomous outcome variables, which are more reflective of decision-making in child welfare and facilitates the specific case of the logistic link function for binary outcome variables under maximum likelihood estimation. ResultsFinal models revealed the proportion of investigations conducted by the child welfare agency involving Aboriginal children was a key single agency level predictor of the placement decision. Specifically, the higher the proportion of investigations of Aboriginal children, the more likely placement was to occur. Contrary to the findings in the first paper (Fluke et al., 2010), individual Aboriginal status also remained significant in the final model at the first level. ConclusionsFurther analysis needs to be conducted to further understand individual and organizational level variables that may influence decisions regarding placement of Aboriginal children. There is also a need for research that is sensitive to differences among, and between, Métis, First Nations and Inuit communities. Results are not generalizable to Québec because data from this province were excluded.

Planning for Emotional Labor and Secondary Traumatic Stress in Child Welfare Organizations

Planning for Emotional Labor and Secondary Traumatic Stress in Child Welfare Organizations

A Quantitative Analysis of Perceived Leadership Practices in Child Welfare Organizations

This quantitative study contributes to leadership knowledge in the field of child welfare organizations by investigating the perceived leadership in the Division of Child and Family Services. Findings indicated significant difference in leadership practice ratings between caseworkers and administrators and also that perceptions of all five leadership practices were different between caseworkers and organizational leaders. The greatest difference between leaders and followers was in the perception of encouraging the heart. Encouraging the heart also presented the greatest variability among caseworkers, indicating a wide variance in how encouragement is experienced and perceived by caseworkers. These findings contribute to implications for social work education and child welfare practice.

Responding to child maltreatment in Canada: Context for international comparisons

The purpose of this paper is to both describe the major fi ndings from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, 2008 (CIS-2008), and to compare these fi ndings to data reported by Gilbert et al. (2011), who derived their estimates from the US National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. The CIS-2008 tracked 15,980 maltreatment-related investigations of children under the age of 16 conducted in a representative sample of 112 child welfare organizations across Canada in the fall of 2008. Bivariate analyses were used to explore the differences in service dispositions, age, and referral sources by primary maltreatment category and risk. The Canadian/US comparison reveals that rates of investigated maltreatment are nearly identical. Rates of substantiated maltreatment are also comparable, although slightly higher in Canada when substantiated risk of maltreatment is included in the substantiation category. The variation in substantiation and service response rates across types of investigated maltreatment requires closer analysis and highlights the need for a detailed understanding of each type of maltreatment. The rapid expansion of reports over the last decade in Canada invites discussion of the extent to which a response focused exclusively on child protection is appropriate for all cases and optimal for addressing a broad array of needs. The complexity of comparing rates between Canada and the United States requires an understanding of both substantiation rates and thresholds.

Hold the Presses: A Commentary on the Effects of Media Coverage of Fatalities on the Child Welfare System

Child fatalities initiate a formidable exchange between the media and child welfare services. The impact affects the families involved, staff and administrators of public and private child welfare agencies, and the community. The media role to provide the public with information in a prompt manner can be at odds with the child welfare administrator's desire to improve practice for all children. In many jurisdictions, the relationship between the media and the child welfare organization is weak, if not adversarial. This commentary poses questions for debate and suggests that the media and child welfare need to have an ongoing relationship where both are focused on informing the public as a continuous process.

More Than the Sum of Its Parts: An Innovative Organizational Collaboration Model

For at least the past decade, the social service sector has been pressed by external forces to develop models of interagency collaboration. While many organizations use strategic partnerships, joint service delivery models, and even mergers to remain viable in climates of competition, few agencies have explored the possible rewards of sharing development and fundraising tasks. This article examines an innovative collaborative fundraising entity forged by three child welfare organizations in the New York City area. The authors conducted structured interviews with key stakeholders at each of the three agencies to describe the model as implemented by the agencies as well as begin to identify the organizational and executive characteristics that may make such models successful. The article concludes with a discussion of recommendations and suggestions for organizations interested in pursuing similar collective efforts, in addition to providing areas of consideration for agency executives.

Learning While Doing in the Human Services: Becoming a Learning Organization Through Organizational Change

Making mistakes during organizational change is surprisingly easy despite extensive “lesson learning” in the professional change management literature. Human services leaders overseeing organizational changes such as integrating a new model or evidence-based practice must prepare to monitor and adjust their course. The “learning while doing” approach relies on data and on adjusting the implementation plan and the underlying ways of doing business. This article describes one agency's successful large-scale administrative, program, and practice change that resulted in better outcomes, stronger infrastructure as a learning organization, and a set of lessons with implications for change management in child welfare and other human services organizations.

Workplace demands and resources as antecedents of job burnout among public child welfare workers: A longitudinal study

This three-wave longitudinal study is the first multiple point longitudinal study to examine the impact of workplace demands and resources on the development of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization among public child welfare workers. This study is contextualized within the Job Demands and Resources (JD-R) theoretical model of burnout development. Growth curve analyses results from an availability sample of 335 public child welfare workers indicate that emotional exhaustion and depersonalization increase over time. Organizational tenure, job stress, and work–family conflict were found to be associated with the development of emotional exhaustion, while age, work–family conflict, and organizational support were related to the development of depersonalization. Implications for workforce management in child welfare organizations and directions for future research are discussed. ►This is the first public child welfare worker multi-wave longitudinal burnout study. ►We examine the impact of job demands and resources on burnout development. ►Emotional exhaustion and depersonalization change and increase over time. ►Tenure, job stress, and work–family conflict predict emotional exhaustion. ►Age, work–family conflict and organizational support predict depersonalization.