Do Master’s in Social Work Programs Teach Empirically Supported Interventions? A Survey of Deans and Directors

Abstract

Objective: A questionnaire to examine efforts toward the teaching of empirically supported interventions (ESI) was mailed to the 165 deans and directors of Council on Social Work Education-accredited Master’s in social work (MSW) programs; 66 (40%) responded. Method: Questions included program characteristics and items assessing both faculty and official program positions on ESI, which were summed to provide scores as an index of commitment to ESI. Results: Informal faculty commitment to teaching ESI was significantly higher than official program commitment, and offering more clinical practice courses was associated with greater program commitment. Factor analysis extracted two components from program emphasis on theoretical models in the overall practice curriculum: (a) experiential and (b) behavioral/systems; correlation of factor scores for these two components, as yielded from regression, with commitment scores, showed that the behavioral/systems component was significantly associated with greater faculty and program commitment. Conclusion: Study limitations are discussed and recommendations address how the findings apply to social work educators and innovations for promoting empirical practice in the MSW curriculum.