The Role of Voice Suppression in Case Managers’ Job Satisfaction and Retention

With the goal of improving child well-being, child welfare agencies have begun to focus on the child welfare workforce and to advance strategies that address job satisfaction and retention. A qualitative approach was employed to gather the perspectives of case managers regarding these important issues. Ten foster care case managers participated through three focus groups. Responses were solicited using a semi-structured set of questions primarily focused on critical factors that affect job satisfaction and turnover. Through inductive coding, a prominent theme emerged regarding the suppression of case managers’ voices. Case managers described the suppression of their voices during decision-making in foster care cases by five types of actors, i.e., supervisors, judges, guardians ad litem, attorneys, and funding agency representatives. Further, they described the negative effects this experience had on both themselves and the children and families they serve. These results demonstrate the importance of inter-professional interactions in the foster care field. Further research is needed to identify the extent of this problem and the ways in which interactions can be improved and all voices can be considered.

Culture of Safety: Using Policy to Address Traumatic Stress Among the Child Welfare Workforce

Human services professionals from all fields may be exposed to dangerous and even traumatic experiences while fulfilling their job responsibilities. Despite the data identifying trauma exposure as a workforce problem, the literature focusing on policy and practice interventions is sparse. Using a safety culture framework, this article describes a case example of one statewide public child welfare agency that utilized innovative policies as one driver of a systemic shift toward enhanced safety culture in an attempt to mitigate the effects of trauma exposure among child welfare workers. Practice implications, next steps, and future research are discussed.

Race, Gender, and Poverty Governance: The Case of the U.S. Child Welfare System

This article argues that the U.S. child welfare system is a primary institution of racialized and gendered poverty governance, operating at the nexus of the assistive and punitive arms of the state. With attention to the ways race and gender structure the child welfare system, I apply the concept of neoliberal paternalism to examine state efforts to reform “bad” parents into “good neoliberal citizen-parents.” I highlight the increasingly decentralized and privatized child welfare workforce and its effects on governance. Finally, I explore the contradictions around expectations of “self-sufficiency.”