Study: Social workers five years in job tend to stay

Child protection social workers are more likely to remain in the job long term if they are still operating in the area after five years, according to a longitudinal study. The new research, which looked at the experiences of longtime child protection social workers, also found that while some felt they were working in “less than optimal conditions”, the challenges of the work was one of the reasons they chose to stay on.

‘Findings From a Longitudinal Qualitative Study Of Child Protection Social Workers’ Retention: Job Embeddedness, Professional Confidence and Staying Narratives’ has been published in the British Journal of Social Work. The three-person team behind the study was led by Dr Kenneth Burns of the School of Applied Social Studies at University College Cork.

The research draws on data gathered over a decade on a group of social workers — ‘stayers’ in a profession where recruitment, retention, and turnover have been pronounced features in recent years. The first wave involved 35 social workers, 22 of whom were initially eligible to contribute to the follow-up study more than a decade later.

The research contrasts the positive dividends of retaining staff with the negative consequences associated with high turnover of staff, such as “a loss of organisational memory” and low morale.

It looked at job ‘fit’, ‘sacrifice’, and ‘links’ and three types of social work career preferences — the ‘career preference’ social worker, the ‘transient’ social worker who expected a short tenure in child protection, and ‘converts’ who unexpectedly found that they enjoyed child protection work.

Fewer of the first category were still working in child protection than expected and according to the study, “the stability that occurs once the 5-year mark is reached was significant for many of the participants”.

“Despite the stresses of the job and the rapidly changing nature of the organisational context, being challenged by a complex and interesting job, learning all of the time, the excitement of the work and a sense of making a difference, contributed to these social workers’ decisions to stay,” it said. “If you can retain child protection and welfare social workers beyond the 5-year point, their retention narratives often remain constant.”