Social work最新文献

As the world undergoes its fourth industrial revolution, digital media are becoming more prevalent in both rural and urban communities. This shift has had a profound impact on our daily lives, transforming the way we live, work, and communicate. Although technology now plays a crucial role in our daily routine, it can lead to interference in human relationships, a phenomenon referred to as technoference. This interference has significant consequences, particularly in parent-child relationships, as it can adversely affect children's emotional and behavioral development and the mental health and overall functioning of parents. Thus, for children to grow up healthy and for families to be harmoniously balanced, all the family subsystems need to be aligned in a healthy manner. This study conceptualizes how family health is affected when technological devices are brought as a subsystem into a family system. The researchers developed a conceptual multidimensional framework based on several interrelated theoretical concepts, and this framework is presented in three sequential frames for better comprehension, to identify how the interference, in particular, impacts the various dimensions of a healthy family system and contributes to dysfunctional family functioning and mental health issues in both parents and children.

This article discusses four questions. First, what is the operational framework of the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB)? Second, how congruent is the ASWB's operational framework with social work values and ethics? Third, why do ASWB exam candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds-those who identify as African American, who are older, and who do not speak English as a first language-register comparatively lower pass rates in the clinical licensure examination? Fourth, what are ethically sound novel strategies for improving the ASWB exam? This article argues that (1) ASWB, in its present state, operates under a business model philosophy, which is incongruent with the social work value of integrity, and (2) the disparities in pass rates in the ASWB exam may reflect its lack of validity. This article also presents three relatively innovative strategies for restoring confidence and increasing success in the ASWB social work licensing exam and two contingent solutions to the problem of exam pass rate disparities based on race, age, and primary language. The implications of this study for social work stakeholders are also discussed.

Social workers have a greater than average risk of suffering burnout syndrome. In the same way as the professionals, students too can suffer academic burnout. However, few empirical studies have studied burnout and protective factors in social work students exclusively. Emotional intelligence (EI) has been described as a protective factor for burnout both in the professional and the academic context. The present study aims to explore which components of EI predict the burnout domains in students studying a degree in social work, in Spain. To this end, 87 social work students completed a questionnaire in which information was gathered on EI, burnout, average grade in the degree, and sociodemographic variables. The regression analysis results indicate that the students with poorer academic success and from higher years reported greater symptoms of burnout. Regarding the components of EI, emotional clarity and emotional repair predict the academic efficacy perceived by the students. These results highlight the importance of including EI in academic policies to promote the design of EI training programs aimed at developing EI skills, particularly emotional clarity and emotional repair, as a way of improving the perception of efficacy in social work students.

As climate change continues to displace greater numbers of people, transnational ties are important sources of social protection for climate migrants. Migrants assemble unique configurations of formal and informal social protections depending on the resources available within their sending and receiving communities. However, the specific constellations of social protections that climate migrants use following disaster and displacement remain underexamined. Authors conducted semistructured interviews with Puerto Ricans who migrated in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (N = 41) and used qualitative content analysis to trace the assemblages of formal and informal social protections used to navigate the resettlement process. Results suggest that informal support from migrants' transnational ties was instrumental in successfully making use of formal sources of support, including federal emergency relief programs, to leave the island and resettle on the U.S. mainland. This reliance on informal social protections often strained participants' informal networks and raised questions of equity for people internally displaced by climate change. These findings highlight the need for a more equitable and effective linkage of climate migrants with public resources.

This study expands knowledge on what motivates engagement in policy practice (PP) by exploring the place of personal values, which reflect individuals' general motivations and context-specific motivations-the motivations to study social work-in predicting the intention to incorporate PP into their practice. The sample of this cross-sectional study comprised 280 BSW students in Israel, and the study employed the Portrait Values Questionnaire-Refined, Social Work Career Influence Questionnaire, and the PP Intention Scale. Path analysis showed that personal values were associated with PP intention both directly and indirectly through the motivations to study social work. However, the mechanisms differ for self-transcendence versus self-enhancement and openness to change versus conservation values. A stronger PP intention was associated with a higher preference for openness to change versus conservation values mediated by the social change motivation to study social work. The total effect of the preference for self-enhancement versus self-transcendence values on PP intention was nonsignificant. This resulted from the contradiction between the negative direct and positive indirect effects (through the social change motivation) of these values on PP intention. The study results underscore the place of personal values and motivations to study social work in explaining PP intention.

Income inequality has been increasing for decades and is now known to be related to many downstream health outcomes, where greater inequality is a predictor of poorer health. Results of investigations into the relationship between income inequality and suicidality have been mixed. This study leverages the most recent data available from the National Longitudinal Mortality Study to investigate the relationship between state-level income inequality and suicide mortality. A series of rigorously controlled logistic regression models, employing multiple measures of inequality, and various suicide mortality case-control specifications are used to investigate the phenomenon. Results indicate that the odds of suicide mortality increase with inequality, and this result is invariant across all models. A reduction in the Gini coefficient from the highest to lowest values of income inequality observed in U.S. states may reduce the odds of suicide mortality by 20 percent to 55 percent or more. Findings have application for social workers and other mental health professionals with respect to clinical assessment and treatment. Likewise, community organizers, policy advocates, and legislators should be aware that policy solutions reducing income inequality in the United States are a mechanism for alleviating the suicide mortality burden.

Guided by the theory of dyadic illness management, this study examined the association between the within-couple incongruence regarding perceptions of pain experienced by adults with fibromyalgia (AwFM) and symptoms of depression and anxiety in AwFM and their partners. Participants included 204 couples. Three second-order dyadic variables were created from the couples' perceptions of pain interference experienced by AwFM: (1) absolute magnitude of incongruence in perception of pain, (2) average perception of pain, and (3) direction of incongruence (i.e., who perceives pain to be higher). Structural equational modeling was used to examine the association between the three dyadic variables and AwFM and partner symptoms of depression and anxiety, adjusting for covariates. These steps were repeated for pain severity. Higher average perception of pain interference within the couple was associated with greater symptoms of depression and anxiety in AwFM and partners. AwFM exhibited greater symptoms of depression when their perception of their pain interference was higher than their partner's. Incongruence variables were not significantly associated with AwFM or partners' anxiety symptoms. Near identical results were found for pain severity. A dyadic approach to mental health treatment, which includes enhanced communication skills, should be adopted to optimize the mental health of couples living with fibromyalgia.