Child Welfare Worker Turnover in Wisconsin
Child Welfare Worker Turnover in Wisconsin

Author: Yonah Drazen

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13:

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A voluminous literature examines antecedents to child welfare worker turnover, a phenomenon that has implications for vulnerable children and families and increases costs to maintain essential services. This dissertation extends the literature by testing whether antecedents to turnover established in the literature are found among child welfare workers in Wisconsin, a previously un-sampled population. Further, it examines whether these antecedents are found among early-tenure child welfare workers, who have received scant prior attention. Finally, it tests whether certain aspects of the Comprehensive Job Attachment Theory (CJAT) are associated with turnover intention. The first paper consists of a systematic literature review and synthesis of the antecedents to turnover and review of theory used in the child welfare worker turnover literature. It then introduces CJAT, a two-part theory that articulates both mechanisms that keep employees at their job and those that lead to turnover. The second paper tests whether antecedents to turnover identified in the first paper are associated with turnover intention using cross-sectional survey data on Wisconsin's child welfare workforce. It also tests a key dimension of CJAT, whether discrete events that may prompt a resignation - "shocks" - are associated with turnover intention. The third paper uses a sample of Wisconsin child welfare workers who are new to their jobs to examine whether the set of antecedents to turnover intention also apply to new workers. It also tests whether elements of CJAT that are theorized to promote job retention are associated with reduced turnover intention. Findings show that the core set of antecedents to turnover found in paper 1 largely hold for Wisconsin's child welfare workforce, and that increasing numbers of shocks may be associated with turnover intention. While the antecedents to turnover largely hold in bivariate analysis among the cohort of new workers, statistical significance drops off in multivariate analyses. Commitment to the field of child welfare is consistently and strongly associated with reduced turnover intention in both samples. This dissertation found preliminary empirical support for CJAT's application to the child welfare field.

The Child Welfare Challenge
The Child Welfare Challenge

Author: James K. Whittaker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1351485164

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Within a historical and contemporary context, this book examines major policy practice and research issues as they jointly shape child welfare practice and its future. In addition to describing the major problems facing the field, the book highlights service innovations that have been developed in recent years. The resulting picture is encouraging, especially if certain major program reforms I are implemented and agencies are able to concentrate resources in a focused manner. The volume emphasizes families and children whose primary recourse to services has been through publicly funded child welfare agencies. The book considers historical areas of service—foster care and adoptions, in-home family-centered services, child-protective services, and residential services—where social work has an important role. Authors address the many fields of practice in which child and family services are provided or that involve substantial numbers of social work programs, such as services to adolescent parents, child mental health, education, and juvenile justice agencies. This new edition will continue to serve as a fundamen-tal introduction for new practitioners, as well as summary of recent developments for experienced practitioners.

Perspectives of Transformational Leadership by Child Welfare Workers
Perspectives of Transformational Leadership by Child Welfare Workers

Author: Taekyung Park

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

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It is not a new phenomenon that there is a high turnover rate among social workers. In particular, child welfare has shown the highest rates of staff turnover. To address the issue, turnover and retention of child welfare workers have been studied for decades. The history of research produced a long list of determinants for child welfare worker turnover, more than 20 factors, and showed conflicting findings with the same variables. Moreover, the long list of factors for workers' decisions to leave has poorly contributed to organizational practices for retaining child welfare workers. Therefore, this study aims to examine organizational factors, particularly leadership, for child welfare worker turnover intention, in order to help child welfare agencies to invent a practice model to prevent qualified worker's turnover. To do so, it is important to examine the effect of organizational commitment on employees' turnover intention. Therefore, following is the primary research question: Does the use of transformational leadership style in social work organizations explain child welfare worker turnover intention? A cross-sectional survey research was employed among workers in public child welfare agencies in a Midwest state, United States (N=214). Five models were examined in terms of the direct and indirect effects of transformational leadership on turnover intention of child welfare workers using STATA ver. 15. The study finding showed that transformational leadership styles of local office directors had a direct and negative effect on child welfare workers' turnover intention. As a result, this study recommends that child welfare provide local office directors with leadership training to reduce preventable turnover of child welfare workers. However, the findings should be cautiously interpreted due to the sampling strategy used in this study.