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Characteristics of the Front-Line Child Welfare Workforce

While many studies have evaluated how and why front-line workers choose to leave the child welfare workforce, few sources of data have been available to assess and compare child welfare workforces across jurisdictions and over time. This study describes and makes available a new data source that researchers and policy makers can use to explore the effects of workforce characteristics on child and family outcomes, and to evaluate factors leading to changes in the workforce over time. This paper provides an exploratory analysis of a new set of geographically and longitudinally comparable measures of worker tenure, worker turnover, worker caseloads, and workforce capacity relative to the at-risk population for 46 states between 2003 and 2015.

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Author(s): 
Frank Edwards, Christopher Wildeman
Year of Publication: 
2020
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Resource Type: 
Gray literature
Language: 
English
Section: 
Resource Database