Supervision in child welfare plays a critical role in enhancing job satisfaction, retention, and client outcomes. Understanding how supervisors can best perform their roles is essential. This study draws on Kadushin and Harkness’s (2014) framework for social work supervision, which identifies three core elements:
- administrative,
- educational, and
- supportive.
Although this framework is widely recognized in social work, its relevance to the child welfare field could benefit from continued exploration. Studies have examined the impact of supervision on specific aspects of child welfare workers’ roles; however, there is a need for more qualitative exploration of how workers articulate their supervision experiences, the benefits they derive from this supervision, and potential areas for improvement.
The present study aims to advance this research agenda by identifying qualitative themes related to three types of child welfare supervision practices—administrative, educational, and supportive—based on feedback from a large sample of child welfare workers. These elements were examined through an analysis of child welfare staff responses to an abbreviated version of the Comprehensive Organizational Health Assessment (COHA; Potter et al., 2015).