IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/cysrev/v30y2008i5p546-563.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Legal ethics and high child welfare worker turnover: An unexplored connection

Author

Listed:
  • Vandervort, Frank E.
  • Pott Gonzalez, Robbin
  • Coulborn Faller, Katlheen

Abstract

This article, which grew out of a series of 11 focus groups with child welfare workers and supervisors, explores how legal ethics may increase the stress child welfare workers experience in carrying out their duties and may contribute to high rates of turnover. A number of workers experienced their interaction with lawyers and the legal system as extremely stressful. Others misunderstood the role of a lawyer. This article considers the various sources of legal and social work ethics and standards of practice at work in lawyer-social worker interaction in the child welfare context and provides a comparison of legal ethics with social work ethics on a number of dimensions. Ethical issues such as defining the client, confidentiality, client loyalty and zealous advocacy are considered. Additionally, issues which are not specifically ethical in nature but are closely related are considered. These include efforts to be objective in handling the work, the personal affront experienced by many child welfare workers when their judgment is called into question and methods of communication. The article concludes that there is a need for training to assist child welfare workers to understand legal ethics and how they contribute to high turnover rates.

Suggested Citation

  • Vandervort, Frank E. & Pott Gonzalez, Robbin & Coulborn Faller, Katlheen, 2008. "Legal ethics and high child welfare worker turnover: An unexplored connection," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(5), pages 546-563, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:30:y:2008:i:5:p:546-563
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190-7409(07)00215-0
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Taylor, Sarah, 2006. "Educating future practitioners of social work and law: Exploring the origins of inter-professional misunderstanding," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 28(6), pages 638-653, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chenot, David & Boutakidis, Ioakim & Benton, Amy D., 2014. "Equity and fairness perceptions in the child welfare workforce," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 400-406.
    2. Chiu, Yu-Ling & Cross, Theodore P., 2020. "How a training team delivers simulation training of child protection investigators," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 118(C).
    3. Lens, Vicki & Katz, Colleen Cary & Suarez, Kimberly Spencer, 2016. "Case workers in family court: A therapeutic jurisprudence analysis," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 107-114.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chenot, David & Boutakidis, Ioakim & Benton, Amy D., 2014. "Equity and fairness perceptions in the child welfare workforce," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 400-406.
    2. Sergey Petkov & Viktoriia M. Savishchenko & Bohdana Semenyshyna-Fihol & Tetiana A. Poda & Iryna M. Chaika, 2020. "Application of Mock-Court as an Interdisciplinary Model for Consolidation of Professional Training of Law Students," Journal of Education and e-Learning Research, Asian Online Journal Publishing Group, vol. 7(2), pages 122-129.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:30:y:2008:i:5:p:546-563. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/childyouth .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.