ABSTRACT



The child welfare workforce is charged with the demanding work of ensuring the safety, well-being, and permanency of maltreated children. Although child welfare work can be rewarding, it is also associated with high levels of stress and burnout, causing challenges to retain staff. Developing organizational cultures and climates within child welfare agencies that are supportive of the workforce and strive to improve outcomes is essential. Applying the ecological systems theory to a child welfare agency provides for an understanding that the agency is comprised of different levels of systems with interactions between the systems. This study examined the association between the individual level factors of job satisfaction, coping skills, self-efficacy, burnout, job stress, and individual affect with organizational level factors including culture and climate. Child welfare workers from one regional area were invited to participate in an online survey utilizing the Comprehensive Organizational Health Assessment and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale. Results indicate that there is an association between each of the individual level factors and the organizational factors. The importance of the role of individual affect was highlighted in the results in that the level of affect reported was associated with corresponding ratings of the perception of the organizational culture and climate. These results provide implications for hiring, training, mentoring, and supervision. This study attempted to assess if the organizational culture and climate of individual child welfare units could be linked to permanency outcomes. This linkage was not possible in this study, however implications to conduct this type of research are made. Advancing the study of organizational culture and climate beyond the impact of such factors as job satisfaction and retention to linking to direct client outcomes is an emerging and important field of research.

Background: There is much concern regarding undisclosed corporate authorship (“ghostwriting”) in the peer-reviewed medical literature. However, there are no studies of how disclosure of ghostwriting alone impacts the perceived credibility of research results.

Findings: We conducted a randomized vignette study with experienced nurses (n = 67), using a fictional study of antidepressant medication. The vignette described a randomized controlled trial and gave efficacy and adverse effect rates. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two authorship conditions, either (a) traditional authorship (n = 35) or (b) ghostwritten paper (n = 32), and then completed a perceived credibility scale. Our primary hypothesis was that the median perceived credibility score total would be lower in the group assigned to the ghostwritten paper. Our secondary hypotheses were that participants randomized to the ghostwritten condition would be less likely to (a) recommend the medication, and (b) want the psychiatrist in the vignette as their own clinician. We also asked respondents to estimate efficacy and adverse effect rates for the medication.

There was a statistically significant difference in perceived credibility among those assigned to the ghostwriting condition. This amounted to a difference of 9.0 points on the 35-point perceived credibility scale as tested through the Mann–Whitney U test. There was no statistically significant difference between groups in terms of recommending the medication, wanting the featured clinician as their own, or in estimates of efficacy or adverse effects (p > .05 for all such comparisons).

Conclusion: In this study, disclosure of ghostwriting resulted in lower perceived credibility ratings.