Do social work education, job description, and cultural competence foster child-welfare caseworkers' therapeutic alliances?

We explored whether the strength of caseworkers' engagement with families in the child-welfare system was associated with the caseworkers' academic degrees, job responsibilities and environments, and/or ethnicity. We extracted data from a national data set describing 1,714 caseworkers. Results confirmed significant association between caseworkers' confidence in their engagement with families and (a) master's- and bachelor's-level social work education, (b) adequate supervision at work, (c) cultural-diversity training, (d) job focus (screening/investigation, out-of-home placement, or reunification), and (e) homogeneous race/ethnicity of caseworker and client.