Journal
RESEARCH ON SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE
Volume 24, Issue 3, Pages 349-355Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/1049731513494021
Keywords
child welfare; field of practice; content validity; psychometric study; internal consistency; discriminant validity; validity study
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
A number of proxies have been used in child welfare workforce research to represent actual turnover; however, there have been no psychometric studies to validate a scale specifically designed for this purpose. The Intent to Leave Child Welfare Scale is a proxy for actual turnover that measures workers' intention to leave. This scale was validated in the current study by a CFA. The resulting factors were compared to actual turnover. Nearly two in three workers who indicated that they had considered looking for a job in the past year actually left their agencies (60.0%). A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to determine the validity of the Intent to Leave Child Welfare Scale. The best fitting model consisted of three factors with acceptable fit statistics (X-2 = 28.6, p = 0.04; RMSEA = 0.05, 90% RMSEA CI = 0.01-0.08; CFI = 0.99; TLI = 0.98). Identified latent factors included thinking, which included observed variables related to workers thinking about leaving their current jobs; looking, which included observed variables related to workers searching for a new job; and acting, which included observed variables related to workers actually taking physical steps to seek a new job. Once a good fitting model was identified, binary logistic regression was conducted to determine odds ratios to predict who actually left their agencies. Each of the identified latent factors was significantly predictive of actual leaving (thinking: OR = 1.24, p = 0.00; looking: OR = 1.25, p = 0.00; acting: OR = 1.28, p = 0.01).
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available