Studies have documented pervasive ableism faced by disabled parents within the child welfare system. However, the experiences of disabled parents facing multiple forms of oppression in this context remain understudied. Recognizing the heterogeneity of disabled parents, this study investigated intersectional oppression from the perspective of attorneys who represent disabled parents in child welfare cases. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 23 attorneys in the United States who represent disabled parents in child welfare cases. Content analysis revealed three main themes related to the experiences and outcomes of disabled parents facing intersectional oppression: systemic mechanisms of oppression, intermediate impacts, and ultimate outcomes. Drivers of intersectional oppression included system structure and institutional barriers, power dynamics, and cross-system interactions. Intermediate impacts encompassed the child welfare system's response and parent experiences, whereas ultimate outcomes included case outcomes and long-term family impact. Addressing intersectional oppression faced by disabled parents necessitates substantive and comprehensive system restructuring, including rules, statutes, practices, and services that currently punish and marginalize affected disabled parents. Paired with structural and policy reform, intersectional training must also be required for all professionals involved with the system to erode individual-level bias.
This study responds to calls for explicitly antiracist social work practice by examining how racial identity shapes professional development and practice among White MSW students. In a profession historically dominated by White practitioners, it explores how students understand and cultivate anti-oppressive skills. A purposive subsample of 21 students from the Midwestern United States participated in virtual semistructured interviews. Innovative data collection and analysis techniques were used to comprehensively investigate development of anti-oppressive capacities across levels of one's ecological context. Guided by a socioecological framework, data were thematically analyzed using structural coding to identify perceived barriers, facilitators, and opportunities for anti-oppressive skill development. Four key themes emerged: (1) effective cognitive strategies, (2) processing emotional reactions, (3) opportunities for diversity exposure, and (4) external supports to growth. Findings highlight the cyclical relationship between cognitive and emotional processes that are impacted by external factors including exposure opportunities and growth supports. These insights underscore the need for emotionally responsive learning environments that foster empathy and address negative racial affect-particularly racialized fear and shame-among social workers in training. Findings have important implications for professional education and training systems for social work and in other helping professions.
Trauma-informed care (TIC) in medical settings, such as neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), is recommended but not widespread. This article examines trauma-informed (TI) perspectives and beliefs, previous training, self-efficacy, and practice behaviors of nurses and social workers who serve infants exposed in utero to opioids/opiates in Level III and IV NICUs in the United States. An online anonymous survey was conducted with NICU nurses and social workers (N = 69). Relationships between perspectives, beliefs and previous training, and self-efficacy and practice behaviors were examined using multiple regression. Results suggest that trauma awareness positively influences whereas judgment of maternal substance abuse negatively influences providers' level of TI practice behaviors; training in TIC and years of practice experience both positively influence providers' TIC self-efficacy. Implications exist for social work education and nursing education as well as practicing nurses and social workers in the NICU setting. Specifically, trainings in TIC and trainings that increase trauma awareness and decrease judgmental attitudes are needed. Additionally, increasing support for current NICU unit staff is recommended.
Social workers strive to end discrimination, oppression, and other forms of social injustice. Despite social work's commitment to antioppressive practices, the profession has historically lacked a critical lens on patterns of oppression that impact Indigenous, Black, Asian, Latina biracial, and multiracial (IBALBM) women. Intersectional frameworks and methods provide analytical tools that identify patterns of racism and sexism and centralize the experiences of IBALBM women in research design. The current study examines the extent to which mainstream social work research investigates the intersection of structural racism and sexism. Researchers conducted a content analysis of research articles from three different social work journals between 2015 and 2022 to examine the extent to which mainstream social work literature centralizes the lived experiences of IBALBM women through intersectional frames and methodologies. Findings reveal a dearth of research examining the lived experiences of IBALBM women through a critical lens. Among the 854 articles included in the analysis, 2.2% examined the lived experiences of IBALBM women, and only two studies applied a structural analytical lens. If the social work profession aims to fulfill the value of social justice, social work research must disrupt patterns of compounding oppression that persist at the intersection of race and gender.
Urban heat islands (UHIs) and extreme heat events (EHEs) disproportionately affect socially vulnerable urban populations. This study examines how 50 populous U.S. cities frame heat problems in relation to social vulnerability, informing social work's role in addressing urban heat disparities. The authors analyzed secondary data from Turner et al.'s research (a study that coded municipal planning documents for heat problems), the 2015-2019 American Community Survey, and the 2020 U.S. Census, looking for associations between UHI/EHE framings and four selected city-level social vulnerability indicators (i.e., rates of poverty, limited English proficiency, people of color [POC], and mobile home residency) while controlling for urban density. Negative binomial regression results reveal a positive association between UHI framings and city poverty rates and a small but significant negative association between UHI framings and POC rates. EHE framings exhibit a significant negative association with mobile home residency rates. These findings suggest uneven patterns in how cities conceptualize heat events relative to their social vulnerability profiles, highlighting the critical need to incorporate social vulnerability considerations into urban heat management strategies, promoting more equitable mitigation and adaptation efforts. The study emphasizes social work's potential contributions through interdisciplinary collaboration, municipal policy advocacy, and community engagement. By integrating vulnerable groups' perspectives into urban heat planning and response initiatives, social work can meaningfully enhance urban resilience and environmental justice.
Alaska Native (AN) communities in remote Alaska experience disproportionately high rates of youth suicide, and have an abundance of social resources, which are often more plentiful and preferred than clinical care. This cross-sectional study of AN community members (ages 15 to 93) describes actions that AN people report doing to reduce suicide risk and promote mental wellness, and uses logistic regressions to assess differences in number and types of actions by age and gender. Results suggest that overall, community members engage in a variety of preventative actions (mean 6.28 out of 11 in the past few months). Notably, there were minor differences in actions related to suicide prevention (e.g., lethal means restriction), health promotion (e.g., sharing with others about wellness), and postvention (i.e., actions to reduce risk following a suicide) based on gender or age. Younger AN people (ages 15 to 29) reported more suicide prevention actions with friends, whereas older people reported doing more with family. Women of all ages reported engaging in more suicide prevention actions than men, particularly offering interpersonal supports. This study highlights the preventative actions already happening in AN social support networks, underscoring the untapped potential of engaging with families and community members to strengthen intergenerational support networks for suicide prevention.
Research shows that for youth living in foster care, strong social support networks (SSNs) can promote resilience across life domains and help alleviate adverse experiences. While prior research documented the relationship between social bonds and reduced crime based on social bonds theory, the role of SSNs in explaining legal system involvement remains understudied. To increase the understanding of the protective factors that help mitigate heightened rates of incarceration among youth transitioning from foster care to adulthood, this study examined the relationship between SSNs and incarceration by considering various characteristics of SSNs (adequacy, type, size, and source). The authors used longitudinal data of transition-age young people in care (N = 616) to examine associations between SSNs and later incarceration. Findings showed that compared with those who reported having inadequate support at age 17, rates of incarceration at age 21 were significantly lower among those who reported having adequate support of two types: emotional and advice/guidance. Regression analyses showed that adequate emotional support, in particular, was a strong protective factor for later incarceration after controlling for covariates. The analyses provide nuanced insights that suggest there may be optimal support types that mitigate incarceration risks. The authors discuss child welfare practice, policy, and research implications.
Life satisfaction is a primary indicator of subjective well-being and is associated with positive psychological status and an overall sense of well-being. This study examined the association between life satisfaction and four dimensions of religion (i.e., organizational religion, nonorganizational religion, subjective religion, and religious coping). The sample consisted of 3,570 African Americans and 1,621 Blacks of Caribbean descent drawn from the National Survey of American Life (2001-2003). Separate linear regression models were constructed for each group to investigate the relationship between life satisfaction and eight measures of religion used to operationalize the four dimensions. All analyses controlled for demographic characteristics, family income, and number of chronic physical health problems. The results indicate organized religious involvement (i.e., service attendance) and subjective religiousness (i.e., self-rating of religiousness) are positively associated with life satisfaction for both groups, while nonorganizational religious activities and religious coping are unrelated to life satisfaction. The results underscore the significance of the organizational and subjective dimensions of religion for life satisfaction among both African Americans and Black Caribbeans. Accordingly, practitioners should conduct a spiritual assessment to identify the potential role that various religious dimensions may play in enhancing wellness in the lives of their Black clients.
Expert assessments have significant influence in child welfare decision making in Norway. Insight into expert assessment is therefore critical to ensure a sound basis for such decisions, yet knowledge about the process of expert assessments is lacking. To close this knowledge gap, authors have developed a codebook to quantitatively explore expert assessment reports in child welfare cases in Norway. The aim of this article is to provide a transparent account of the development of the codebook. Authors describe how codebook reliability and validity were established. The value of the team approach is emphasized. Insight into the process may be of particular value to other researchers considering quantitative content analysis of qualitative reports in both child welfare research and other contexts. This is a potentially important study in developing a tool that provides empirical oversight regarding the practice of experts in the field of child welfare.
Using the concept of consistency matching in person-environment fit theory, this study explored the relationship between social workers' organizational cultural identification and job burnout and the mediating effect of job satisfaction. For the empirical analysis, this study used 1,174 cross-sectional sample data points from the China Social Work Longitudinal Study published in 2019. The results show that organizational cultural identification has a negative predictive effect on job burnout and that job satisfaction has a mediating effect on the relationship between organizational cultural identification and job burnout. This study clarified the intermediate mechanisms by which job satisfaction affects the relationship between organizational cultural identification and job burnout, and expanded the research on the association between organizational cultural identification and job burnout. Finally, this study proposes some positive countermeasures and suggestions for enhancing the cultural identity of social work organizations, increasing concern for social workers' job satisfaction, and encouraging and cultivating social workers' positive work emotions.
Sexual harassment on college campuses is a pervasive problem. Students of social work are not exempt from these experiences and may in fact be at heightened risk for sexual harassment given the nature of their work and requirements for field training experiences. Indeed, many social work programs report dealing with instances of student harassment during field placement. Therefore, it is important to know how social work programs prepare students for the possibility of encountering sexual harassment in their field placements, how field offices respond when instances are reported, and the policies and procedures that guide those actions. In addition, because of the potential need to implement policies specific to field placement contexts, it is important to identify the perceived challenges to effective training and policy development. To answer these exploratory research questions authors analyzed qualitative interview data from 14 field directors in U.S. schools of social work. Authors find that schools of social work often rely heavily on university Title IX offices and other university systems to respond to reports of sexual harassment in student field placements. The article discusses some of the perceived challenges of current training, policies, and processes, and considers the social justice implications of these findings.
A formal evaluation of social work literature on the topic of gendered racism has yet to be undertaken. Accordingly, authors present a scoping review of peer-reviewed social work literature on gendered racism. Guided by Arksey and O'Malley's scoping review framework, databases were searched for peer-reviewed journal articles including the term "gendered raci*" and published by social work scholars or journals since 1991. In the sample of 33 articles, the majority (57.6%) were published in 2021-2022 and over half featured quantitative research, most often published in psychology journals. Several aspects of gendered racism were represented, including gendered racial socialization, gendered racial stereotypes, gendered racial microaggressions, structural or context-specific gendered racism, and gendered racial stress. Several populations are underrepresented in social work literature on gendered racism, including Indigenous, Latine, transgender, and nonbinary people. There is a need for greater provision of policy implications in social work literature on gendered racism. Authors recommend that social work journals provide a platform for scholars to share knowledge on topics related to gendered racism.
