This year, Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, Research Associate at CEED, wrapped up the final phase of a multi-year study funded by the Sauer Family Foundation. The study looked at reflective consultation for child welfare workers in Minnesota. Reflective supervision or consultation is a form of relationship-based professional development. It is mainly offered in fields that impact the lives of young children, like infant mental health and home visiting. People who work directly with families and young children can be provided with reflective supervision or consultation (sometimes referred to as RSC or RS/C) by their own supervisor or by a trained outside consultant.
The child welfare field is increasingly making use of reflective consultation. Meuwissen’s study looked at a pilot reflective consultation program for a county child welfare agency. The agency had not done any reflective supervision prior to participating in the research project.
The pilot implemented group reflective consultation for child welfare workers and administrators. It also included training to help workers get the most out of their reflective consultation sessions. The training included information on secondary trauma, burnout, physiological stress, and trust-building among teammates.
Data collection amid staff churn
Meuwissen surveyed participants before, after, and at the midpoint of the 18-month pilot. There were, however, limits on the data she was able to collect. Due to high turnover rates, only four workers participated in the full 18 months of the study. Still, the results are encouraging.
“We learned that most people really appreciated the chance to sit down, talk through things, and be seen as a human whose wellbeing was worthwhile. The fact that their agency decided to pay for this service made them feel cared for,” says Meuwissen. “Also, a lot of people were working fully remote and did not have strong relationships with their coworkers. So many felt like they got more connected to their team.”
The results demonstrated that:
- The model worked well for child welfare workers and supervisors; participants were satisfied with the format.
- Workers felt supported and valued the opportunity to reflect and connect with co-workers.
- Additional support was helpful in managing stress, navigating crises, and promoting wellbeing. However, stress levels remained high, and some still found the work unsustainable.
- Workers increased their skills in perspective taking, self-regulation, and relationship building.
- Reflective consultation sessions were a safe place to discuss issues of power, privilege, and race.
Studies have demonstrated the benefits of reflective consultation in other fields such as clinical infant mental health and home visiting. This study shows that these benefits also apply to child welfare, which can have more intense job stress and a higher prevalence of the belief that showing emotions on the job is unprofessional (Ferguson et al., 2019).
The pilot study was an important, detailed look at what occurred in one county. But Meuwissen feels there is still much that remains unexplored about reflective consultation in the child welfare field. The Sauer Family Foundation funded an extension project that included interviewing child welfare workers around Minnesota about their experiences with reflective consultation.
“Many studies have focused on the impact of reflective supervision on supervisees. People like it, and it’s generally good for them. That has now been established,” Meuwissen says. “I thought, because we’re doing this across different agencies, let’s learn more about how people do reflective supervision and consultation. How big is your group, or do you meet one-on-one? How often do you meet? Do you meet on Zoom or in person? There is still a lot to learn about the impact of these decisions.”
Surprisingly varied responses
Meuwissen asked interviewees about the logistics of their reflective supervision and consultation programs. She asked how participants felt about different modalities. She asked about barriers to being reflective. What made it easier to reflect? What were the pros and cons of different formats? What she learned surprised her.
“I was expecting that participants would basically cast their votes and one modality would win,” she says. “It was not like that. It was so nuanced. For example, take meeting online versus in person. Some people were adamant that being in person seems more respectful of human stories. Other people felt so much safer not being in the office. They said things like, ‘I can turn off my camera if I get overwhelmed. I can share more, and more authentically, when I’m on my computer.’ And there are snow storms, transportation, accessibility issues. The data did not show that being in person or being online works better. It depends a lot on the person and the situation.”
With study participants expressing so many individual–and contradictory–preferences, Meuwissen says the most important thing organizations can take away from this study is “to be intentional when making decisions about doing reflective consultation. Take time to think through how it will work, and know that it matters for how open participants are to deep reflection.” Supervisors should seek input from their workers and understand that having some flexibility for groups to operate in ways that feel best for them can help participants get the most out of their experience.
Workers with reflective supervision experience think and talk differently about their work
Part of the purpose of reflective consultation is to help people in relationship-based work (like child welfare) increase their ability to be reflective. Reflection can be defined as “stepping back from the immediate, intense experience of hands-on work and taking the time to wonder what the experience really means” (Zero to Three, 2019). Meuwissen’s interviews with practitioners around the state showed initial evidence that reflective consultation is effective in increasing reflectiveness.
“I asked each participant to tell me about a family that has been challenging,” Meuwissen says. “Why has it been difficult to work with them? How did you resolve the difficulty? What did you learn?”
The research team rated participants’ responses on 15 different scales. They then refined their results to score participants in five different areas of reflectiveness.
“Workers who had experience with reflective consultation talked differently and understood their work with families differently. People who had been doing reflective consultation for longer scored higher on reflective skills like taking other people’s perspectives, understanding their own emotional reactions to the work, and holding a curious, non-judgemental stance. It’s what you expect and hope, but this research hasn’t been done,” Meuwissen says. “So it was exciting to actually find that this was the case. If reflective consultation helps people be reflective, compassionate, and nonjudgmental, that should directly translate into better practice.”
Another insight from the study was that having a reflective consultant with experience in child welfare was very important to child welfare workers.
“There’s a big difference between being a child welfare worker and being a home visitor, for example. Child welfare workers are assigned to a case after something bad has happened. They can take children away. So that’s a really different feeling for your work and what your work means,” Meuwissen says. “It seems hard to understand from an outsider’s point of view: ‘How do you do that every day?’ So child welfare workers really value having a consultant who is an insider.”Meuwissen shared the results of the project’s first phase in a report and podcast on Promoting Resiliency in Child Welfare Workers through Reflective Practice. The second phase yielded a report as well as two practical guides, collected under the title Learning from Child Welfare Workers’ Experiences with RSC. One guide is for child welfare administrators who are considering adding reflective consultation. The other guide is for the consultants. All of the study results are freely accessible to the public.
