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Although public child welfare has historically been a major employer of professional social workers, within the last twenty years MSW graduates have shunned public social services for the private sector. Using Title IV-E funds, universities have responded to this shortage by providing financial and educational incentives for graduate social work students to work with the diverse and complex cases in public child welfare. As a result, the numbers of graduate social workers seeking employment in public child welfare have increased, but questions remain about the extent to which professional social workers remain employed in public child welfare agencies beyond their employment payback period. This paper reports the results of one research study on the factors that affect the retention of these master's level child welfare workers.

A national survey of 556 faculty at accredited schools of social work examined 4 dimensions of the publishing process: publishing productivity, perceptions of overall quality of social work journals, satisfaction with social work journals, and perspectives on the manuscript review process. Findings indicate the publishing process in social work is perceived as a system of complex relationships between individual and institutional arrangements. Qualitative analysis provided the basis for a discussion of strategies for improving the relevance, methodological rigor, and overall quality of professional social work journals.

Objective: To empirically examine whether the educational background of child welfare workers in Florida impacts on performance evaluations of their work. Method: A proportionate, stratified random sample of supervisor and peer evaluations of child protective investigators and child protective service workers is conducted. ANOVA procedures are used to test if performance scores on a multitude of items differ for workers with university degrees in social work, psychology, sociology, criminology, education, business, and other fields. Results: The ratings of social workers' skills and competency do not statistically differ from those workers with other educational backgrounds on 20 measures of performance. Conclusion: Findings suggest that the educational background of child welfare workers is a poor predictive variable of their performance as evaluated by supervisors and peers. However, more research is needed to determine if performance evaluations of workers are positively correlated with successful service outcomes with clients.There has been an accelerated effort during the past 15 years to reprofessionalize public child welfare with bachelor's of social work and master's of social work graduates from accredited schools of social work. This effort has been supported by educational institutions (S.

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