Case Assignment Principles for Achieving Worker Well-Being, Organizational Justice, and Casework Quality

This qualitative descriptive study was designed to identify case assignment principles and capture the ways supervisors and case managers experience these principles. A total of 59 supervisors and 127 case managers from the child welfare field responded to two open-ended survey questions about the case assignment principles used in their agencies. The first aim was to provide a description of case assignment principles. Coding of responses revealed eight principles that guided case assignment. These eight principles include rotation, equalization of caseload, equalization of the number of families/children served, equalization of caseload complexity, matching to case manager competence, matching to case manager interest/convenience, respecting case manager safety, and supervisor discretion. The second aim was to provide a description of experiences with these varied case assignment principles. Authors identified three themes of fairness/organizational justice, worker well-being, and casework quality. The results outline the varied ways in which case assignment is conducted and point to the difficulties in simultaneously achieving the three goals of fairness, worker well-being, and casework quality through a single case assignment method.