“Suffering in silence”: How social workers in child welfare practice experience and manage burnout
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social workers in child welfare practice encounter dilemmas, tensions, contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalence as they attempt to meet the competing demands of the Tri-sphere — the formal child welfare system, the professional theories and values guiding practice, and the child welfare service recipients. This study explored how these encounters result in worker burnout and how that is managed. The study used a constructivist grounded theory approach. Data were collected in St. John’s, NL, Canada, employing in-depth individual interviews with 18 frontline child welfare social workers. Findings reveal that child welfare social workers regularly experience varied feelings and emotions of burnout and utilize a variety of self-care strategies to manage. Recommendations include a call for child welfare agencies to provide opportunities for workers to feel heard and acknowledged about any negative feelings and emotions, strengthen positive peer supports, and promote essential self-care practices such as offering reduced membership cost for physical activities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".