Findings From a Longitudinal Qualitative Study of Child Protection Social Workers’ Retention: Job Embeddedness, Professional Confidence and Staying Narratives

Kenneth Burns · Alastair Christie · Siobhán O’Sullivan

34 citations0/0 files storedThe British Journal of Social Work

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Social Work Education and Practice Child Welfare and Adoption Social Sciences and Policies

Abstract

Abstract The retention of social workers in child protection and welfare is an ongoing concern in many countries. While our knowledge based on the turnover of child protection and welfare social workers is growing, much less is known about ‘stayers’—those who undertake this work for over 10+ years. This article draws on the data gathered over a decade in Ireland on these social workers. The article addresses three questions: (i) What can we learn from social workers with 10+ years’ experience of child protection and welfare about their retention? (ii) Does job embeddedness theory help explain their choices to stay? (iii) Does the ‘career preference typology’ (Burns, 2011. British Journal of Social Work, 41(3), pp. 520–38) helps to explain social workers’ retention? The main findings are that if you can retain social workers beyond the 5-year point, their retention narrative intensifies, their embeddedness in the organisation and community strengthens and they have a stronger sense of professional confidence as they move out of the early professional stage. A surprising finding of this study was that nearly all of the social workers in this study had a staying narrative that changed little between their interviews a decade apart.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

References

2014Resilience and Burnout in Child Protection Social Work: Individual and Organisational Themes from a Systematic Literature Review 2005Narrative in Social Work 20015. The unfolding model of voluntary turnover and job embeddedness: Foundations for a comprehensive theory of attachment 2006Increasing human and social capital by applying job embeddedness theory 2012A review of job embeddedness: Conceptual, measurement issues, and directions for future research 2015Job burnout and affective wellbeing: A longitudinal study of burnout and job satisfaction among public child welfare workers 2011What Can Be Done to Promote the Retention of Social Workers? A Systematic Review of Interventions 2013Reducing turnover is not enough: The need for proficient organizational cultures to support positive youth outcomes in child welfare

Cited by

2022‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’? The Experiences of Forty Social Workers in England Who Had Previously Indicated They Would Stay In or Leave Children and Families Social Work 2022The power of relationship-based supervision in supporting social work retention: A case study from long-term ethnographic research in child protection 2023‘There is not much we can do’: The roles and challenges of Nigeria's child protection social workers

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.