Between the rock and hard places: how child welfare workers in \nSt. John’s Newfoundland navigate competing demands at work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Child welfare work involves the navigation of different demands which sometimes appear conflictual. The child welfare worker is at the centre of these demands and must deal with them. This study explored how social workers in frontline child welfare practice experience and manage the competing demands imposed by the child welfare system, child welfare service recipient system, and social work professional values and theories, which are conceptualized as “the Tri-sphere”. The study used a constructivist grounded theory approach. Data were collected in St. John’s, NL, Canada, employing in-depth individual interviews with 18 social workers in frontline child welfare practice. The study concludes that the competing demands of the Tri-sphere create tensions for frontline child welfare workers. They experience the tensions in ways such as unrealistic expectations, uncertainty and confusion, and burnout, which is characterized by feeling stressed and emotionally overwhelmed, feeling terrible, and feeling of failure. To manage these experiences, some participants follow policy regulations strictly, some tweak or manipulate policy and some negotiate with supervisors or child welfare service recipients. Self-care practices — counselling, receiving support from co-worker, participating in recreational or leisure activities, and contemplating career change — are also used to manage negative emotions or feelings. The implications and limitations of the study as well as recommendations for future study, social work education, and social work practice are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".