Journal of Social Work

Black women who use substances face significant barriers to accessing resources and parenting their children, largely as a result of interactions with the criminal legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems. While extensive literature has demonstrated how structural racism and punitive policy approaches underpin the operation and impact of these systems, minimal attention has been paid to how social workers approach child, maternal, and family well-being when interacting with clients who use substances and have been incarcerated. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 19 social workers practicing in jail/prison, community, and hospital settings across the United States.

Interviews identified the cyclical and intergenerational nature of harms perpetuated through criminal legal, child welfare, and healthcare systems. Participants described structural racism, inadequate resources (i.e., housing), and previous criminal legal and child welfare involvement as compounding barriers to an individual’s ability to parent and maintain recovery, particularly among Black families. Participants described the pervasiveness of structural racism but did not perceive themselves as active participants in perpetuating racist and oppressive structures.

Social workers engage with Black pregnant women who use substances across diverse practice settings and as such have the potential to both contribute to systemic harms and to champion interventions that target the root causes of inequity. Study findings support structural interventions that dismantle punitive systems and re-center the needs of Black communities, thereby supporting Black mothers in their fundamental right to parent their children.

Applying the participatory approach alone to development projects has yet to lead to the active participation of the marginalized in African development projects. A qualitative phenomenological research design was utilized. The study purposively included six communities across Delta State, Nigeria, based on the presence of development projects. Eighteen participants with high incomes and above, and 18 participants with low incomes and below were included in the study using the snowball sampling technique. The total sample size for the study was 36. Unstructured interviews were used to collect data, which were thematically analyzed.

The findings, which are of significant importance, revealed that the studied communities benefited from town halls, open-stall markets, borehole water, roads, primary health care centers, primary schools, secondary schools, irrigations, electricity, and hospitals. The participants with low incomes and below indicated a low level of participation in the development projects due to poverty, lack of formal education, inadequate information, government interference, male domination, lack of interest, and discriminatory cultural practices. The participants with high incomes and above indicated a high level of participation believing that they were better positioned to participate in development-related matters in the communities.

The findings suggest a promising potential for change. There is a clear need for social work educators to adopt the empowerment-participatory approach into Nigerian social work curricula, and social work practitioners should apply it for active community participation, and sustainability in Nigerian and African development projects.

Existing scholarship discusses social work during war and conflict, but less social work scholarship specifically names and focuses on the reality of complex emergencies. This article discusses perspectives on “good” social work practice in complex emergencies by drawing upon a study of Northwest Syria which included 29 interviews with international and Syrian practitioners.

This study found that although Syria did not have a formal social work profession before the emergency, the crisis created a need for social work practice to bolster and help reactivate Syrian families and communities’ supportive nature. Participants perceived “good” social work practices as a range of practices, that are suitable to the community, which helped to reactivate the family and community's supportive role. Practitioners described how “good” social work practices incorporated Syrian culture and were best performed by practitioners with certain characteristics. Ultimately, this article argues social work practice should aim to reactivate rather than replace these important and existing culturally embedded forms of support.

During complex emergencies, “good” social work practice considers and incorporates cultural aspects such as spirituality and stigma. A range of social work practices, which are suitable to the community, can help to restore family and community supports. Practitioners who know the community, are trustworthy, and have a relevant background can best perform what are regarded as “good” social work practices.

As community respondents to disease prevention and control, social workers faced extreme demands and challenges during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Based on data collected from 762 social workers in Beijing's urban area in 2022, this study conducts a moderated mediation model with Bootstrapping analysis to investigate how their effort-reward imbalance influences their work engagement and what role professional identity and perceived performance appraisal play in this relationship.

The results show that when social workers perceive an effort-reward imbalance, their professional identities become weaker, and their work engagement decreases to avoid aggravating the imbalance. In addition, a top–down designed and controlling performance appraisal can enlarge this relationship.

Social workers, as the frontline respondents to the pandemic where high efforts are unavoidable, should be granted more rewards to correct the effort-reward imbalance. Also, any management measures, including performance management or appraisal, shall be fairly designed as a useful source, helping social workers’ improvement and acknowledging their efforts, rather than merely imposing control.

This study aims to identify and quantitatively assess the challenges faced by residents of disappearing rural areas, which present significant obstacles for social workers, and to outline potential solutions using the example of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). For this purpose, interviews were conducted with social workers (n = 112), and questionnaires were administered to residents of disappearing rural areas (n = 101) and prosperous villages (n = 121).

The results of the questionnaire were compared using Student's t-test, which showed statistically significant differences for UAE citizens between the components combined in the categories Loss of home (p_value= .01, at p < .05), Material reasons (p_value = .043 at p < .05), Privacy (p_value = .039, at p < .05), and Medical support (p_value = .05 at p < .05). According to the ratings provided by participants, the component that received the highest weight was Loss of home, with an average rating of 4.5 points across the sample of citizens. In contrast, noncitizens assigned equal importance to Loss of home and Medical support, with an average rating of 4.3 points for each of these components. To solve the problems identified with the help of a social worker, it is proposed to actively use modern technology to find and perform work, obtain information, and consult with doctors and psychologists through video communication, with the social worker acting as a prompting and technical assistant.

In addition to offering suggestions to social workers, this study provides important information for policymakers at different levels of government to adopt constructive social welfare reforms for residents of disappearing rural settlements.

Home care workers often work alone and are geographically distant from colleagues, managers, and security services, placing them at a high risk for client-initiated violence. Studies have shown that home care workers are subjected to significant degrees of such violence, yet there is an indication of underreporting. Based on 25 individual and group interviews with 79 staff from various types of home care services in Sweden this study aims to enhance our understanding of why home care workers choose to report or not report violence.

Using a theoretical lens of emotional labor, the findings reveal that, in the face of violence, workers manage their emotions in accordance with organizational and professional norms. This contributes to and perpetuates a view of client-initiated violence as something that workers should endure, manage, and prevent, rather than acknowledge and report. In the long run, this idea shifts the focus away from the organization and its responsibilities, redirecting it toward the individual worker.

As the findings suggest that violence is often minimized and normalized, finding a common definition of client-initiated violence in the organization could relieve workers from having to define and, at worst, reinterpret violent incidents. Furthermore, norms contributing to an understanding of violence as a professional failure should be addressed. Organizations and cultures that facilitate swift reporting, provide organizational support and work against the stigmatization of those who report are likely to create safer and better work situations for their home care workers.

This study examined how youth perceive their health, well-being, and working-life capacity in relation to ecosocial work within the context of sustainable development. Data were gathered using the photovoice method with two discussion groups, including 11 15- to 19-year-olds from Gävle, Sweden. Inductive thematic analysis was used to create themes from the data. The Having-Doing-Loving-Being model of well-being by Helne and Hirvilammi, and Zimmerman's psychological empowerment were applied to interpret the findings.

The findings indicate that the participants saw sustainable development as a “buzz concept” with low relevance for their health and well-being. The participants perceived health and well-being as “feeling good” on an individual level, with more emphasis on doing activities for self-actualization and less on working-life capacity or environmental issues. They expressed no interest in disseminating the results of their discussions to other stakeholders for collective empowerment and social mobilization, which is a crucial part of the photovoice method. The results also indicate an individualistic and hedonic life orientation among the participants.

The study provides social work and its practitioners an understanding of the importance of enabling youth voices and linking youth personal and collective well-being with sustainable development. The study also offers an understanding of well-being within social work discourse that incorporates environmental stewardship alongside youth's personal fulfilment.