Date of Award

12-2025

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Family and Consumer Sciences

First Advisor

Kimberly Doudna, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Antoinette London-Johnson Wright, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Jou-Chen Chen, Ph.D.

Keywords

Barriers, home visitors, improvement to policies and practices, interview, mixed methods, self-care

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

Home visiting has the potential to support families in increasing their parenting skills, reducing incidents of child maltreatment, increasing school readiness, and improving financial sustainability (HRSA, 2023; Peacock et al., 2013). Retention of home visitors in programming is crucial to retaining families in home visiting (Damashek et al., 2020; Fifolt et al., 2017; Holm-Hansen et al., 2017; Ramakrishnan et al., 2022). While many home visitors struggle with burnout, research has found that self-care strategies are effective for social work students and are even used widely by home visitors (Begic et al., 2019; Siebert, 2008). This nested mixed-methods study examines answers to a self-care inventory and semi-structured qualitative interviews with home visitors and supervisors of home visitors to determine what barriers there are to self-care and suggestions to minimize the barriers. The quantitative analysis shows that home visitors practice a variety of self-care methods. The qualitative analysis found that home visitors experienced many barriers to self-care with certain workplace policies helping or harming self-care. Home visitors had many suggestions for self-care including intentional leadership as well as recognizing that each worker’s needs were different. This information could be used to understand needs for change in workplace policies to improve retention of workers which may in turn increase family retention in home visiting programs as well.

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