Challenges of Social Work Student Conducts A Practice on Family in Context of “Relationship of Social Worker – Client”

Abstract

Field work in the field of social work is vital to support the application of learning in the class to the form of skills through experience with clients. The core of this study is to examine the challenges faced by the two cohorts of final year students of the social work undergraduate program in building relationships with clients while conducting fieldwork with child and family client. This research applied a qualitative method with a grounded theory approach as the study design. The data collection techniques are through document analysis and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). A total of 37 field work reflection documents written by the first cohort students are analysed to obtain the initial themes related to challenges of social worker-client relationships while 62 second cohort social work students were involved as focus group informants to get more in-depth information. The findings show that there are 5 main issues of challenges of social worker-client relationship namely (i) difficulty building trust because clients lack knowledge about social work (ii) projection towards the agency of social welfare (iii) limited relationship with certain family members (iv) denial of parenting style problem (v) authority of discussion distorted to advice. All identified challenges associated with the society’s understanding of the social work profession itself and few ethics issues are also discussed.