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BJSW Advance Access published online on March 11, 2008
British Journal of Social Work, doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcm170
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved

Working in Human Services: How Do Experiences and Working Conditions in Child Welfare Social Work Compare?

Pia Tham and Gabrielle Meagher

Correspondence to: Pia Tham, Department of Social work, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: pia.tham{at}socarb.su.se


  Abstract

Child welfare agencies in many rich countries are having difficulty recruiting and retaining social workers. However, these problems are not unique to child welfare: retention problems have also been widely reported in both mental and general health facilities. In this paper, we compare the perceptions of work and working conditions held by child welfare social workers with the perceptions held by other professional human service workers in the public sector in Sweden. Do the social workers' experiences of their tasks or organizational conditions differ from the other groups, and, if so, how? Are workforce problems particularly acute in child welfare, or do social workers in this field share more or less common problems with other human service professionals? We found that although social workers in general, and child welfare social workers in particular, made positive assessments of some dimensions of their working lives, social work was unusually demanding among human service professions on several measures of workload, complexity of tasks and quality of management. The strains of the job that social workers expressed call upon employers to promote working conditions that offer more support, and to recognize and value social workers for their work.

Keywords: child welfare social workers, human service occupations, comparison, working conditions, human resource orientation

Pia Tham is a doctoral candidate at Stockholm University, Department of Social Work, and is undertaking a research project on organizational conditions for child welfare social workers. Gabrielle Meagher is Professor of Social Policy in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney.


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