Core Social Work Research Articles

MSW students go to burn camp: exploring social work values through service‐learning

Service‐learning is an experiential learning approach that offers promise in facilitating students' personal growth and professional value development while providing service to the community. In a course that implemented this approach, 21 MSW students participated as volunteers in a seven‐day camp for burn‐injured children. This study explores the impact of this experience on the students' learning through the analysis of journals, transcripts of focus groups, and written course evaluations. Data were classified according to two broad categories of learning: learning about the personal self and learning about the professional self. The findings indicate application and integration of learning that reflect social work core values such as social justice, the importance of human relationships, integrity, and service. These findings suggest that this educational approach may be an effective strategy in facilitating a deeper understanding of key areas of the social work profession for students.

Black children with a white parent--social work education

This paper analyses the rationale for teaching about black children with a white parent in social work education and suggests that great care is required to avoid reinforcing pathologising assumptions and inappropriate social work interventions. It proposes that the way forward lies in providing core social work teaching that, in process and content, provides the foundation for good practice with all service users, including black children with a white parent. It suggests that discrete teaching specifically on black children with a white parent can extend, but not substitute for, this core social work teaching. It highlights the specific elements within this core teaching that are particularly pertinent to good practice with black children with a white parent and identifies a discrete curriculum that can consolidate positive approaches and practice with this group of children and young people.

Empowerment Practice in Canada and the United States

Abstract This article discusses the legacy of colonialism and racism in Canada and the United States. It shows how this legacy, combined with a market-oriented philosophy to social and economic issues and policies, has resulted in major, persistent social problems in both countries. It goes on to argue that an empowerment-oriented approach, by restoring policy issues, and therefore social justice issues, to the core of social work, can help the profession address these problems more efficiently. The article concludes by examining three particular challenges related to empowerment-oriented practice: creating partnerships; working with and in communities, and finding optimal ways of integrating all levels of social work practice.

Teaching Social Work Writing

This article presents an approach to teaching social work writing within the core social work curriculum. Writing is recognized as being critical to effective professional practice and as an essential social work skill. Writing is also presented as a strategy for teaching social work knowledge, values, and skills. The authors share what they have learned and developed on the basis of their own teaching experiences with baccalaureate social work students. They identify nine purposes of social work writing, linking assignments with each purpose and discussing how the assignments can be used to teach social work writing skills concurrently with other core social work skills.

Evaluating self‐determination: an adult protection case study

Self‐determination is widely regarded as a core social work value and as central to work in adult protection. However, it is not unproblematic and raises difficult questions about how to balance empowerment and protection, or rights and risks. Inter‐agency procedures and the recent publication of policy guidance may reflect these difficult questions rather than assist practitioners and managers to resolve practice dilemmas they encounter.

Managed Care

SUMMARY The changing organization of health care requires social workers to deal with a variety of new demands, and in some cases alter their traditional professional practice. Using the specific case of childhood cancer as a framework (or set of case examples), this paper identifies key issues faced by oncology social workers in hospital settings under managed care and ways they have responded to them. The general content involves pressures on oncology social workers to adapt to the new corporate culture and ideals fundamental to managed care at the same time that the expressed psychsocial needs and desires of survivors of childhood cancer necessitate increased attention and expansion of service provision. Caught in conflicts that challenge them to reconcile simultaneous commitments to client service/empowerment and institutional conformity, social workers must establish a more powerful position to negotiate institutional and public policies that uphold the primacy of a core Social Work ethic: A commitment to client-centered service.

Infusing Feminist Empowerment Content into Undergraduate Social Work Courses

Using the feminist framework, six instructional modules were developed to teach empowerment practice to undergraduate social work students. The instructional modules, designed for 50 or 90 minute class sessions, used feminist strategies and materials on gender, race, oppression, and privilege to infuse content about women in poverty and women of color in six core social work courses. The modules built onto what was already being taught in each course and made no major changes to the undergraduate curriculum. A follow-up study examined whether feminist and nonfeminist faculty used the modules and if standardized modules were effective in infusing empowerment content. Survey findings from sixteen faculty and 481 students showed the modules were used by faculty regardless of their experience with feminism. Students reported improved understanding of empowerment and demonstrated the ability to define empowerment and name disempowered groups. Implications for social work education are discussed.

The Fee in Social Work: Ethical Dilemmas for Practitioners

Although the meaning of money matters in psychotherapy has been addressed since the inception of this practice, these discussions have focused almost exclusively on the perspective of the client. It is only recently that the professional literature has begun to examine more extensively the perspective of the practitioner regarding money and the fee. The dramatic and at the same time subtle infiltration of managed care into various aspects of social work practice recently has required individual practitioners and consequently, the profession as whole to actively attend to fee concerns. Within this current economic-practice climate, range of recurring fee issues and related ethical dilemmas have surfaced. This discussion delineates some of the fee-related issues and accompanying ethical dilemmas commonly experienced by social work practitioners. The discussion is an effort to awareness and recognition of the issues that may in turn serve to inform practitioners as they struggle to intervene with clients in clinically and ethically sound ways. Although the literature on ethical dilemmas in social work practice has addressed important concerns such as client confidentiality, practitioner values, sexual misconduct, and choice of treatment modality, scant attention has been paid to ethical dilemmas that are fee related. An ethical dilemma may be described as controversy that involves conflicting moral principles in which one experiences different moral pulls (Purtilo & Cassell, 1981, p. 7). In attempting to resolve such dilemmas, consideration is given to personal values, attitudes, beliefs, duties, and obligations. Ethics plays central role in clinical practice only as informing clinicians' goals and basic methodological assumptions but also as being an aspect of almost every judgement every clinician makes . (Dean & Rhodes, 1992, p. 128). Ethics A practitioner's ethical framework embodies universal values such as justice, respect, individual self-determination, and personal ethics. These values are part of every clinical intervention, which also is influenced by practice models and theoretical orientations, as well as the practitioner's view of cultural norms and beliefs. Finally, all of these variables are subject to the practitioner's interpretation in the process of practice implementation. Ethical-clinical tensions occur when practitioner attempts to maintain an ethical stance while understanding the client's sense of the importance of his or her different priorities (Dean & Rhodes, 1992, p. 130). The NASW Code of Ethics (1996) acknowledges that ethics are subject to the content and complexity of the human experience (p. 1), while offering a set of values, principles, and standards to guide decision making and conduct when ethical issues arise (p. 2). The stated guiding principle of the code is to enhance human well-being within the framework of core social work principles and cautions that social workers should be aware of any conflicts between personal and professional values and deal with them responsibly (p. 3). Simply put, the fee is likely to evoke range of ethical-clinical tensions and dilemmas for practitioners in private and agency practice settings insofar as it represents the practitioner's or the agency's income. The implication of this, however, is quite complex because this reality is not always congruent with the client's priorities, potentially positioning the client and the practitioner in conflicting positions. Private practice carries an inherent tension insofar as the fee is the one aspect of the therapeutic relationship in which something is asked of the client from which the practitioner will benefit personally. In this context the social worker must effectively balance the primacy of the client's interests against his or her own income needs in any decision, whether it be in setting, adjusting, or collecting fees. …

Foucauldian Fallacies: An Essay Review of Leslie Margolin's Under the Cover ofKindness

In Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work, Leslie Margolin argues that social work's core mission is neither altruism nor justice but, rather, the exercise of power, to investigate and socially control the poor on behalf of the other classes. He supports his claim with a Foucault‐style analysis of the power relations implicit in social work discourse as it appears in case records and journal articles. In this essay review, I examine Margolin's case interpretations, his postmodernist and Marxist methodological assumptions, and his arguments regarding social work's mission and function. I find that Margolin's case interpretations do not reflect the content of the case material and that he fails to offer the kinds of evidence necessary to support his claim that the mission of social work is social control. Although well written and engaging, the book offers more of a caricature of social work than a serious argument about the profession's mission. The book also suffers from broader problems afflicting forms of postmodernist scholarship that see exploitative power relations behind every social interaction.

Where Are the Fathers in the Literature? Pretty Likely Right Here in Families in Society

Geoffrey and Jennifer Greif (page 433) update a review by Greif and Bailey that Families in Society (FIS) published in February 1990 on the frequency of social work journal articles on fathers. The earlier review examined five core social work journals published during the period 1961 through 1987. The update in this issue examines the same journals' production of articles about fathers in the years 1988 to 1996. Greif and Greif find a dramatic threefold increase in such articles. And they provide a brief analysis on how fathers are viewed in the more recent literature.

The Relative Influence of Social Work Journals

This article compares the results of two methods of ranking the influence of journals based on citation counts. For 22 core social work journals, ranking by Social Sciences Citation Index’s “impact factors” is compared with ranking by “core influence” scores, which count citations only within the same core journals. The substantial differences between the rankings suggest that impact factors do not accurately indicate the most influential journals within the discipline of social work. The implications of these findings for faculty and libraries are discussed.

College reflections on practice theory

This article was written shortly after the author had moved from a practice setting in the probation service to a college setting, where he teaches on the DipSW programme. It arose out of the experience of encountering again, through reading and teaching, the body of social work theoretical literature. This led to reflections on the concept of theories of theories of practice and practice theories, the latter being very alive for the author as a recent arrival from practice but subject to some recent criticism in the literature. At a time of rapid development in the social policy context of social work and increasing specialisation — and consequently risk of fragmentation in social work — the author argues in favour of the legitimacy of both theories of practice and practice theories. A cross-fertilisation between them serves to produce core concepts of good practice, which stand as an essential reference point for practitioners. These first principles are a necessary bulwark against social work's imposing, oppressing and coercing tendencies. All three tendencies are examined: the imposing in terms of positivist practice traditions, the oppressing in terms of racism and the coercing in terms of recent policy and legislative developments in the probation service. The latter receives the most extended examination because of the risks arising from the extremely coercive agenda held by government. The article concludes by finding in probation a strong social work core philosophy which, to date, is sustaining a professional integrity in the service's response to the new legislation.

Private Troubles and Public Issues

This paper describes a course for clinical social work students which presumes social work's core commitment to work at the psychosocial interface, but addresses this commitment using the conceptual tools of social constructionism. The course is based on socia constructionist interests in the social and historical construction of professional knowledge; the value of multiple lenses to understanding any clinical phenomenon; and the inclusion of the position of the subject in the disciplined examination of any theory. We look at the social construction and location of commonly encountered psychiatric diagnoses; at the same time, we use these tools to examine the construction of the professional identities of the course participants.

The Role of Social Work Journals in the Development of a Knowledge Base for the Profession

Journals play a fundamental role in the development of professions by selecting and preserving elements of their body of knowledge. What editors choose to publish has consequences. One way of assessing how editors and journals are performing is by examining whether what is published is used by other scholars. Using impact scores derived from citations, we examine the impact articles published in core social work journals have on other scholars. The data indicate that the profession is served by several core journals that have consistently improved their contribution over the years. The data also suggest that some journals publish work that is rarely used and apparently has little effect on the profession.

Social Workers Training Primary Care Physicians: Essential Psychosocial Principles

The growth of primary care medicine is opening new roles for the social worker in medical education to provide instruction and to design curricula that include the psychosocial dimensions of medical practice. This article describes a family-oriented, community-based medical residency program in which the social work faculty plays a prominent role in the education of young physicians. The relevance of core social work principles to medicine and how they are introduced into the teaching and precepting of medical residents are discussed.

A Concentration in Social Work Practice with Sex-Related Problems

Abstract While a single elective course in human sexuality is a useful supplement to core social work courses in preparing students for the sex-related problems they will encounter, a more comprehensive sequence of learning experiences is necessary for those who wish to develop greater competence in this area. This article describes such a sequence offered by the University of Hawaii School of Social Work which focuses on treating and preventing sex-related problems experienced by various populations, particularly the sexually oppressed These learning experiences include class and field activities, research projects, and guided experiences as sex educators at local agencies, as producers of a weekly radio program, and as leaders of small discussion groups for a basic sex education course.

Impact of Community Needs on Casework Policy

In this imperfect world of ours, we all too frequently find a parent faced with a difficult reality problem not of his own making. New York schools are overcrowded and teachers often overworked to the point where they cannot give needed individual attention. Many a parent is right when he says that in a better school his children would not be so unruly. Bad housing conditions, periodic unemployment, and subsistence-level public assistance all play their share in contributing to family breakdown. Granting these shortcomings in our society, we know that the individual who wants to lead a full life must learn to make an adjustment to the world as it is. No parent can change the school system, let us say, from one day to the next. As an agency staff we have the responsibility of working toward better community facilities and higher standards, and letting our client group know that we are doing this. We are, for example, attempting an interpretative job with the schools our clients’ children attend and in selected instances we have been successful in helping a family obtain emergency housing. Clients themselves can be encouraged toward positive social action within the range of possibilities open to them. In the short run, however, limitations must be accepted. Here again, whenever we have been unable to reach the client in any other way, we have used the direct approach of telling him that he was expected to do his utmost within the reality situation. There is another lesson we have learned, or perhaps relearned, since taking on Youth Board contracts. This is the importance of close co-operation among the different agencies interested in the client. Too often, in the more recent past, specialized agencies working in their individual capacities have tended to be oblivious to the client as a total person and of the help one agency can give the other. If the community aim is geared toward prevention, protection, and rehabilitation, agencies must be prepared to be flexible and imaginative not only in the use of their own resources, but also of each other. Sometimes the sudden impetus of outside stimuli is needed to revitalize capacities within the agency which have become dormant and inactive through disuse. This is what happened when the New York City Board enlisted our co-operation in the fight against juvenile delinquency. The Brooklyn Bureau's ability to rise quickly to this challenge was, as we have seen, due to strong conviction of service to the community in its totality. Such consciousness does not permit of isolationism—neither can it remain confined to a single aspect of our work, such as referrals from one source, nor to service to a distinct group of clients. The staff of the agency, convinced of the validity of this approach and its positive implications as far as protection and prevention are concerned, is now able to broaden the community service given. This means a positive “going out” to clients, whether referred by the Youth Board or other community sources, as well as to the person who comes to our doors with a halting request for assistance but who is too weak and disorganized to pick up immediately on his own. In short, as caseworkers, we have developed a new aliveness to our responsibility to society and a greater awareness of the pulse of the community. Undoubtedly, we can and shall go further than we have gone to date; change with developing needs is the hallmark of a mature profession. The core of social work is a concern with relationships, with the living together of individuals and the interaction of the individual and society. Perhaps we can think of the voluntary counseling agency as a link between the individual and the community. As has been said, “The profession that does not begin with the individual does not begin and the profession that ends with the individual ends.” Maturity is achieved as we learn to consider ourselves part of a larger whole.

Case-Work Methods of Helping the Client to Make Maximum Use of His Capacities and Resources

Social work as a profession is one of society's instruments for enabling the social conscience to find expression. The very core of social work is social reform. The very core of social case work is the rehabilitation of the individual. The stigmatized reformer is one who needfully attempts to impose himself on others, to re-create the individual in his own wishful image of himself, or to mold the world to his own liking without realistic reference to needs, capacities, and motivations of individuals and