There is general agreement that social worker turnover is not desirable. Yet social work administrators who want to institute changes which might reduce the rate of turnover have little accurate information about the causes of worker mobility -- and without such information, any change activity must be based on a trial-and-error approach. In this study general propositions and hypotheses about social work turnover have been deduced from what is known about worker mobility generally and have been assessed in the light of the available literature on social worker mobility