A Pilot Study to Develop and Validate the Social Worker’s Integration of their Faith – Christian (SWIF-C) Scale

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that social workers’ intrinsic religiosity is the largest predictor of whether they integrate clients’ religion/spirituality in practice. However, to date, no instrument has been developed to begin to understand the complex relationship between how a social worker’s faith impacts their social work practice and vice versa, especially among social workers who self-identify as Christian. Thus, this paper describes the development of the Social Worker’s Integration of their Faith – Christian (SWIF-C) scale to explore the following: 1) Does the SWIF-C have content and criterion validity? 2) Can the SWIF-C be condensed into fewer subscales to explain factors related to practitioners’ integration of their own religion, spirituality, and faith (RSF) into practice? The results indicated the SWIF-C is reliable and an exploratory factor analysis resulted in four subscales, including the: 1) impact of social work on one’s faith, 2) impact of faith on one’s social work practice, 3) impact of faith on one’s social work identity, and 4) conflict between one’s faith and social work. Based on these findings, implications and recommendations for social work education and practice are discussed.