Resources Database

The profession of social work has a leadership role in the field of child welfare. Opportunities were provided through public policies allowing schools of social work to recieve Title IV-E funding for professional development of child welfare workers. There are now hundreds of partnerships that spent millions of federal dollars to professionally educate Bachelor of Social Work and Master of Social Work students for careers in child welfare. But there is no research that will evaluate these partnerships’ effectiveness.

The paper is based on an implicit assumption that supervision is carried out in rural areas without taking into consideration the best practices available in scientific literature. They intend to keep an implicit epistemic distance to that assumption. This research was conducted through a constructive Grounded Theory methodology using structured and directive interviews as the main technique.

The article promotes awareness of secondary trauma among child welfare workers. The risk of experiencing burnout and secondary trauma increases when exposed to multiple traumatic events when working with children and families. Engaging in positive coping strategies, such as seeking supervision, attending trainings on secondary trauma, working within a team, balancing caseloads, and work–life balance are methods to negate effects of working with traumatized individuals.  

This report discusses practicums and their important role in many of the professional courses in higher education. This research provides an overview of different ways in which the practicum has been conceptualized, implemented and evaluated in higher education. Findings indicate that whilst the practicum is widely accepted as a valuable and successful component of professional education, it has a number of shortcomings; and the lack of good quality research into the practicum makes it difficult to draw unequivocal conclusions.

This paper exposes students to the ways in which social work and law intersect. Students will explore the judiciary’s contributions to important social policy issues and the knowledge social workers need to effectively participate in the judicial process. It presents basic legal concepts, describes the workings of the court system, and shares strategies for avoiding malpractice. The units that follow cover a variety of topics to give instructor’s options for their course and allow students to study their interests.

The article is an investigation regarding preferences for job characteristics among final year medical, nursing, pharmacy, and laboratory students at select universities in Uganda. Participants were administered a cadre-specific discrete choice experiment that elicited preferences for attributes of potential job postings they were likely to pursue after graduation. Salary, facility quality and manager support were the attributes that affects almost all student-groups’ job posting choice.

The Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are major campaigns on closing gaps on educational disparities. This study (N=124.592) examined the impact of these campaigns over eight years from five sub-Saharan African countries. Findings show that considerable progress has been made to close the disparity based on orphan status, and the gender gap is also closing.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of large group supervision, and combined group and individual supervision with counseling students. Using a pre-test/post-test method, counselors were rated on growth in effectiveness and development according to self-report, supervisor, client, and objective rater responses.

This paper reviews the use of location-allocation models in health service development planning in the developing nations. The purpose of this review is to examine the suitability of these methods for designing health care systems and their relevance to overall development problems in such countries.

The article argues that evidence-based practice suffers from a dilemma whereby a narrow view of evidence is prioritized at the cost of relevance to social work and suggests that praxis-based knowledge informed by different forms of knowledge is a better option with a greater potential to enhance the use of knowledge in social work practice. The article highights that phronesis is important for making social science matter in practice, and that this holds true in particular for social work. 

This report follows a program implemented by the University of Nairobi, who leveraged resources from the Medical Education Partnership to develop an institutional program that provides training and mentoring in implementation science, builds relationships between researchers and implementers, and identifies local research priorities for implementation science. Implementing science theory, methods, and experiences are included in the curriculum.

This article discusses the origin of social work education in Africa. Social work in Africa was not a product of a progressive social metamorphosis but rather that of foreign methodologies imposed on African societies. It will also further discuss the future direction and development of the field.

The purpose of the article is to monitor and evaluate the feasibility of implementing Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) to address trauma and stress-related symptoms in orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in Zambia as part of ongoing programming within a non-governmental organization (NGO).

From five underserved, remote districts of mainland Tanzania, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted among informants recruited. In order to draw lessons necessary for improving recruitment, distribution and retention of health workers, they held a comparison of decentralized and the reinstated centralized systems.

This resource provides a meta-analysis of research articles regarding the impact of supervision on worker outcomes. Published between 1990 and 2007, the 27 articles reviewed include a combined sample of more than 10,000 workers in child welfare, social work and mental health settings. The outcome of the research shows that workers who receive effective supervision reciprocate with positive feelings and behaviors toward their jobs and organizations. 

This study identifies the relationship between demographic variables, personal perceptions, organizational conditions on turnover and intention to leave. Findings show that organizational commitment, professional commitment, burnout and job satisfaction were best predictors of intention to quit. 

The purpose of this study of County Welfare Directors Association (CWDA) was to identify general trends that seem to be emerging throughout California. The desired outcome would be to equip individual counties with vital information that will assist in recruitment and retention resulting in practitioners with a greater breadth of experience directly related to the field of social services. This study was an informal trend analysis and findings presented herein are based self-reported data from each county.

Child and family practice has become increasingly complex, which was recognized as a field of social work. While it is growing, in relation to effective supervision, there has been little research about the components of effective supervision. This report explored practitioners’ and supervisors’ experiences of effective supervision in this field by interviewing experienced supervisors and supervisees. The findings confirmed that complexity and centrality of the supervisory relationship, with the experience of a safe supervisory relationship, were essential.

The research highlights experiences and perspectives of student social workers, project leaders and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to meet the six key roles, and demonstrate working with the legal framework, risk awareness, and management and assessment skills. It also considers how the developments in England will have an impact upon student social workers within ‘non-traditional’ placements in the future and their implications for the project.

This paper is about a study to determine which of the organizational, personal, and supervisory variables identified in prior research on this topic are most associated with intent to leave among employees in urban and rural child welfare settings.