Specialist in Group Work?

Abstract

“What does it mean to be a specialist in group work?” As the editor of a journal named The Journal for Specialists in Group Work (JSGW), this has become an important question for me for the last four years or so. It is something that I had not questioned deeply before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic but saw as undisputed aspect of my reality. As a member of the Association for Specialists in Group Work (ASGW) I was a specialist, surrounded by other specialists, and each of us focused our lives and work around the groups we were a part of or created. We were also a group unto itself, and as “groupies” (the unofficial nickname of ASGW members) celebrated aspects of group throughout our lives and practice. How could anyone question “group work” or the specialist designation that followed those counted among our ranks? The COVID-19 pandemic provided me a good deal of time to reflect and question, which is something I did across all areas of my life. One question that continued to come up for me, however, had to deal with something that had been an unquestioned and routine part of my academic life. Who is a specialist and, by extension, as we review, edit, and publish articles in our journal, how do we know we are holding true to the needs of our readership who expect to review our pages to deepen their specialist-level understandings of group work? This has also appeared to be a hard question for many of the authors who submit to our journal, many of whom have provided us submissions that have spanned the spectrum of group work. Although I believe our journal’s “aims and scope” page provide some level of detail about how we define group work for the purposes of our journal, we periodically receive submissions from scholars across fields of education (i.e., in relation to teachers assigning tasks in groups to students in K-12 schools or in university settings), social psychology (e.g., in-group and out-group research), political science (i.e., explorations of conflict between two national groups or orientations), etc. that explore non-clinical/counseling forms of group work. As these submissions do not meet what I believe the journal’s intentions are for group work, I have found myself forced to provide desk rejections and comments to authors who send us these manuscripts that address other forms of group work. I always attempt to be kind (or as kind as one can be when providing a rejection disposition) and provide other options for these scholars to disseminate their work. The other form of group work manuscripts that comes to our journal (and comes from scholars both within and outside of our counseling disciplines) involves research about groups, but the manuscripts themselves do not appear focused on the group under exploration (e.g., group dynamics, group leadership, group techniques, etc.). Research is the primary focus of these manuscripts, whereas the group itself appears to either serve as a secondary focus, or unaddressed element. Does research focused on something that happened in a group qualify for publication in JSGW? I would argue no, not necessarily. THE JOURNAL FOR SPECIALISTS IN GROUP WORK 2021, VOL. 46, NO. 4, 291–293 https://doi.org/10.1080/01933922.2021.1985330