Authors of accountability: Paperwork and social work in contemporary child welfare practice

This analysis drew from a study in which child welfare professionals were interviewed about their definitions of “well-being” and the barriers and facilitators to promoting well-being in their daily practices. Participants consistently identified an unfortunate irony: that the practices they consider essential to promoting well-being are often constrained by system-wide efforts to ensure compliance with child welfare mandates, including the well-being mandate. The systems' need for data on accountability and compliance was often viewed as antithetical to practices of well-being for children and families. During in-depth interviews with 28 child welfare professionals in a large Midwestern city, casework was described as having two key dimensions: social work and paperwork. “Social work” was characterized as the work of building strengths-based relationships with clients. “Paperwork” was characterized as requirements to document practices to ensure compliance with institutional mandates. The latter form of work was often described as diverting time and attention away from the former. However, poignant counterpoints to this characterization of paperwork were provided, illustrating ways that it might facilitate social work. We propose a set of essential questions for future research in the role of paperwork in child welfare practice, including an exploration of what kinds of accountability paperwork enables and how these forms of bureaucratic authorship relate to other forms of communication and relationality in contemporary child welfare systems.