Author: Yonah Drazen

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13:

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.