Empowering Child Welfare Workforce: Supporting Child Welfare Student Interns and Agency Supervisors through Group Supervision, Tuition Sponsorship, & Stipend

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Courtney Wilson, Ph.D., LCSW

Florida International University

CO-PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Michelle-Ann Rhoden Neita

University of Illinois-Chicago

PROJECT TEAM:

Hui Huang, Ph.D., MSW, University of

Texas at Arlington

OVERVIEW

Existing interventions to address turnover focus on either supporting prospective child welfare workers in their post-secondary education or changing child welfare agencies through organizational interventions. There are gaps in the existing interventions, and the Empowering Child Welfare Workforce (ECW) project intends to address the gaps. The ECW project aims to increase retention in child welfare workforce through a three-component intervention: 1) tuition sponsorship and stipend for social work student interns in child welfare agencies; 2) manualized biweekly group supervision for social work student interns in child welfare agencies; and 3) manualized monthly group supervision for supervisors in child welfare agencies. The project participants will include a small cohort of BSW student interns placed in child welfare agencies and a small cohort of supervisors from child welfare case management agencies. The group supervision will be provided from August 2022 until May 2023 (i.e. fall 2022 and spring 2023 semesters). The researchers hypothesize that participants’ positive experiences with the ECW project will be associated with less stigma towards child welfare-involved parents, less secondary traumatic stress, higher levels of self-efficacy and empowerment, and higher levels of intention to stay in child welfare. Five waves of data will be collected to test the hypotheses. The ECW project could provide the child welfare field with a manualized approach to conduct group supervision among student interns and agency supervisors, as well as create a model for providing student interns clinical support that involves the collaboration between the university and agencies.

PROJECT GOAL:

There are gaps in the existing interventions, and the Empowering Child Welfare Workforce project intends to address the gaps. The ECW project aims to increase retention in child welfare workforce through a threecomponent intervention.

CURRENT STATUS

The Florida International University IRB approved the study in July 2022. As of September 13, 2022, seven students and ten supervisors were recruited for the project. All supervisors and students have completed the program baseline survey wave 1 via Qualtrics. The supervision manual has been developed and finalized. Students and supervisors attended a program orientation and were informed of the program’s requirements for participation. All participants signed a consent form to confirm their participation in the project.

NEXT STEPS

The next steps include conducting the second and third wave of quantitative data collection; conducting a 2-hour focus group with the BSW students; conducting a 2-hour focus group with supervisors from agencies; and interviewing field instructors of each BSW student. Additionally, the team plans to obtain feedback on the manual.

A final report will be submitted to the Institute in April 2023.