Measuring the impact of public perceptions on child welfare workers

ABSTRACT

The Public Perceptions of Child Welfare Scale measures how the social environment influences child welfare workers, including their job satisfaction and intent to leave. Psychometric studies have validated the scale for private child welfare workers, but there are no validation studies with public agency staff. This study fills that gap, showing stigma and respect are important constructs that also predict worker intent to leave. This research found an additional construct, blame, which was not present in private worker validation studies. The scale provides an important tool for the field as we continue to build evidence for effective recruitment and retention.

KEYWORDS:

• Scale validation
• recruitment and retention
• public perceptions
• private and pubic workforce
• environmental factors

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported through a Cooperative Agreement with U.S. DHHS, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau, Award No. 90CT7002 to the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI), a partnership between the University at Albany, University of Denver, University of Maryland, Michigan State University, Portland State University, and University of Southern Maine. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Children’s Bureau.

Notes on contributors

Catherine K. Lawrence

Catherine K. Lawrence, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Welfare, University at Albany, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on research that informs and promotes effective human services, particularly in the areas of child welfare and income support. Dr. Lawrence’s research perspective reflects a pragmatic approach to social science that includes exploring useful ways to apply mixed methodologies to research questions.

Wendy Zeitlin

Wendy Zeitlin, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work and Child Advocacy at Montclair State University. Her work examines workforce issues in child welfare with the aim of contributing to the building of stable and effective child welfare systems. While most of her work is quantitative, she has also done mixed methods research to optimally understand workforce challenges.

Charles Auerbach

Charles Auerbach, PhD has been a professor at Yeshiva University for the past 30 years; he currently teaches research methods at the masters and doctoral levels. He has been involved in a number of longitudinal studies on recruitment and retention of child welfare workers resulting in several peer-reviewed articles on workforce issues. Dr. Auerbach has also co-developed an open-source, software package, SSD for R, for the R statistical environment that is specifically designed to analyze single-subject data.

Sreyashi Chakravarty

Sreyashi Chakravarty, MA, MHRM, is a Doctoral Research Assistant at the University at Albany School of Social Welfare. She holds a Master's degree in Communication from University at Albany and a second Master's degree in Human Resources from University of Calcutta, India. She has researched and published on issues of equity in child welfare workforce and human service delivery. At present, she is working on her dissertation research on institutional racism.

Shauna Rienks

Shauna Rienks, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Social Work and Senior Research Analyst at the Butler Institute for Families at the University of Denver. She has more than 15 years of experience in research design, development and testing of measurement tools, and qualitative and quantitative data analyses in the fields of child welfare workforce development; child development; family relationships and well-being across the lifespan; and social determinants of health. Through this work, she hopes to improve the health and well-being of children and families and the workforce that serves them.