Self-care is a social justice issue: social work students’ themes of social injustice within their self-care experiences

Abstract

ABSTRACT Self-care, though inconsistently defined, has come to be regarded as an ethical professional responsibility for social workers and a workforce issue. How to teach self-care to social work students as part of their professional readiness training is becoming more widely discussed and researched. An investigational study of 85 social work students (BSW = 33, MSW = 52) at a public Midwestern university examined their learned and lived experiences of self-care. General inductive analysis brought forward three themes suggesting that there may be social justice factors which inform how self-care is understood and practiced: Disparities related to wealth and social identities; Social systems and societal structures which cause barriers and constraints to accessing self-care; and Sociocultural ideologies which assign value and meaning to self-care. The authors contend that as the profession continues to work toward conceptualization of a definition of self-care and as the academe wrestles with the incorporation of self-care into its curricula, further exploration of the potential social injustices surrounding the defining and practicing of self-care is imperative.