Turnover In Child Protection Service From Worker Experiences
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Tsai, Meng-Chung
Abstract
Child protection workers’ high turnover rate has been a deadlock after child protection policies were enforced. In 2006, Executive Yuan enforced the regulation to increase the number of child protection workers to 320; however, the turnover rate still significantly surpassed the growing rate of reported cases. Furthermore, the Control Yuan proposed censure against several public officials for the strict working environment, including heavy caseloads, long working hours, high pressure, extreme danger, poor treatment, low work achievement, and unpromising future, that child protection services social workers are under in 2011. In order to provide proper suggestion on reducing turnover rate of child protection workers, the thesis aims to understand the dynamic under turnover factors of the workers in public sector and the influence on the turnover decision, and to further discover personal , organizational and environment condition, critical incidents of turnover decision, and turnover experiences. The thesis uses qualitative research method to survey samples through semi-structured interview. The 7 selected interviewees are former public sector child protection workers with at least 2 years of working experience in the industry. The research finds that the turnover reasons are seemingly related to personal consideration. Nevertheless, the key factor is the death incident of a female child surnamed tsao, which led to media’s attention and the investigation by the Control Yuan. Their intervention deteriorated the nature of child protection works, such as losing belief in child protection and deepened bureaucratic control, like the strict requirement of 24-hour social worker visiting and 4-day investigation deadline. Moreover, the service content became narrower, and the professional decision became susceptible to bureaucratic intervention. The changes on policies further caused impact on organization management and undermined the trust relationship among different levels, like leader-supervisor, supervisor-worker, and worker-worker relations. The thesis provides several suggestions from the legislation level: to transfer reflection on child protection policies with a concept of absorbing outside advices; to use screening and differential response mechanism, and to adopt tertiary prevention, including advocating accurate report on mandatory reporters, reinforcing 113 children and women protection hotline, and building proper indicators on child protection procedures; to recruit continuously to overcome the lack of human resources, and to refine the standards of personnel allocation with latest information; to balance the work load; to reinforce professional image and power. As for the organization level: to create a trust-based organization culture with transparent communication; to reinforce professional decisions over bureaucratic intervention; to construct a comprehensive supervisory and training regulation in order to support social workers; finally, to advocate positive interaction with public media.
Subjects
child protection service social worker
turnover
turnover experiences
critical incidents
Type
thesis
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