Social Work Commons^™

Incarcerated Mothers Achieving Reunification: Providing Support To Child Welfare Social Workers, Francesca Villarreal

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project explores the barriers to reunification with their children for incarcerated mothers in an effort to provide more support to child welfare social workers who engage with this population. Project participants were selected from one regional office of a child welfare agency in Southern California to complete qualitative interviews. Participants included seven Social Service Practitioners (SSPs), two Supervising Social Service Practitioners (SSSPs), and one Data Analysist. Each participant’s interview was digitally recorded, transcribed, and analyzed following the systematic manual coding method with the assistance of Microsoft Word (Ose, S, 2016). Five common barriers were identified: child visitations with incarcerated …

Child Welfare Social Workers’ Perspective On Factors That Influence Longevity, Veronica Betancourt-Perez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The child welfare sector has been dealing with the issue of turnover for many years and it has yet to implement effective solutions to mitigate the problem. In this study, the researcher used a post-positivist approach to examine contributing factors that affect job longevity in child welfare. The researcher reviewed literature as well as used motivation and organizational support theory to determine what potential factors influence job longevity among child welfare social workers. The researcher gathered demographic information and qualitative data from ten interviews with child welfare social workers employed by the County of Los Angeles Department of Children and …

Parent Partners' Perceptions Of Reunification Celebration And The Impact On Reunified Parents, Marley Leila Walker, Tre'nise Jemel Anderson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In the study, the researchers explored parent partners’ perceptions on reunification celebration events and the impact the event has on fostering reunified parents’ use of positive parenting skills. A qualitative design was completed using convenience sampling. The researchers studied previous research that focused on the reunification process and the general importance of celebrations in child welfare as a precursor to their study. The researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with nine parent partners from one child welfare agency in Southern California. Our findings revealed four major themes of the study. First, we learned of the importance of recognizing reunified parents’ for their …

Social Workers' Perception On The Needs And Services For Foster Children With Special Needs, Jessica Joanna Jimenez, Winnie Wing Yang Lee

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Foster children are already at a disadvantage given that they tend to live in a home without their parents. Social workers have direct interactions working with children with special needs, and through interviews with the workers, we aimed to understand whether or not the services available are able to meet foster children’s special needs. The research on special needs children in foster care is quite limited. The purpose of the study was to identify social workers’ perceptions of the needs of special needs foster children and their access to services.

This study used qualitative interviews with open-ended questions to gather …

Adverse Childhood Experiences And Coping Methods For Social Work Students, Treyveon Parks, Alex Hernandez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of the following study was to explore and examine the prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and coping methods among social work students at a Southern California university. The literature on ACE scores suggests that higher levels of ACE can impact well-being and functioning in adults, yet, provides limited information relating to social work.

A quantitative survey instrument constructed by Felitti and colleagues (1998) and two additional questions relating to coping methods and strategies were constructed by the researchers were used to gather data for the purpose of this study. Data for the following study was collected through …