Self-Care, Self-Efficacy, and Burnout: Personal Resources Shaping Child Welfare Workers’ Retention Intentions

Background and Purpose: Child welfare workers face high job demands, burnout, and turnover that undermine service quality and child and family outcomes. Although organizational conditions are well-established predictors of retention, less is known about how individual resources such as self-care and work self-efficacy shape burnout, job satisfaction, and intentions to remain in child welfare. Guided by job demands–resources theory, this study tested whether self-care and work self-efficacy function as personal resources that reduce burnout and, in turn, indirectly affect job satisfaction and intentions to leave the agency and the child welfare field in a mediation model.

Methods: Data came from Wave 3 of the Florida Study of Professionals for Safe Families, a longitudinal study of newly hired Florida child welfare workers. The analytic sample included 1,118 workers with child welfare experience in the past 12 months who completed the Wave 3 survey. An observed-variable path model was estimated in lavaan using full information maximum likelihood. Self-care and work self-efficacy were specified as exogenous personal resources predicting burnout and job satisfaction, with self-care also predicting work self-efficacy. Burnout and job satisfaction were specified as predictors of intention to leave the current agency and intention to leave child welfare, with residuals of the two intention variables correlated. Indirect and total effects were estimated to test whether burnout and job satisfaction mediated associations between self-care and the intention outcomes.

Results: The mediation model fit the data well, χ²(4)=8.96, p=.06, CFI=.996, TLI=.986, RMSEA=.033, SRMR=.019. Higher self-care was associated with higher work self-efficacy (β=.12, p<.001) and lower burnout (β=−.24, p<.001) and had a small positive direct association with job satisfaction (β=.05, p=.046). Higher work self-efficacy predicted lower burnout (β=−.28, p<.001) but did not have a significant direct association with job satisfaction (β=.04, p=.20). Burnout strongly predicted lower job satisfaction (β=−.52, p<.001) and higher intentions to leave the agency (β=−.19, p<.001) and child welfare (β=−.22, p<.001; higher scores indicate greater intent to leave). Self-care showed significant total indirect effects on job satisfaction (b=.68, p<.001), intention to leave the agency (b=.17, p<.001), and intention to leave child welfare (b=.16, p<.001) via pathways through lower burnout and, to a lesser extent, higher work self-efficacy and higher job satisfaction, indicating partial mediation.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings from a large statewide child welfare workforce sample suggest that self-care and work self-efficacy operate as modest but meaningful personal resources that reduce burnout and, indirectly, shape job satisfaction and intentions to leave the agency and the child welfare field. Future studies with this data are planned to examine organizational resources, such as supervision, time pressure, and organization climate and their impact these identified personal resources. The goal of these studies are to underscore the importance of pairing organizational strategies to address job demands and supports with efforts that enable workers to engage in self-care and strengthen self-efficacy (for example, through training, reflective supervision, and protected recovery time) as part of comprehensive, multilevel approaches to improving child welfare workforce retention.