This study addresses the mental health impacts that refugee children experience following displacement and relocation in a new residency. The study question focused on testing the validity of a model of Syrian children’s adjustment to environmental and social challenges in a refugee camp in Jordan. The findings identify three predictors that significantly contribute to children’s adjustment: parental support, quality of services, and child trauma. Social workers can use the study’s findings to advance their services and mental health interventions for this population and to examine key variables relevant to stress and trauma in the field of refugee and child displacement.
This review compares the influence of hospital and community settings on psychosocial outcomes in interventions led by medical social workers. Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses methodology (2015–2025), 30 studies were selected. Findings indicate that psychosocial outcomes vary according to institutional and ecological contexts, including resource availability and mechanisms of community engagement. Hospital-based programs involve emotional stabilization and preparation for discharge, while community-based programs involve resilience-building, empowerment, and involvement in society. There is no single standardized intervention model, but common elements can be identified, involving the family, coordination at discharge with practical resilience measures or structural principles applicable to integrated psychosocial care.
This article presents practice-based reflections from a rural development program implemented under social work leadership in Divle Village, Türkiye. Following the geographical indication registration of Divle Obruk Cave Cheese, the program aimed to turn economic opportunity into inclusive community development through cooperative strengthening, women’s participation, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and community-based tourism. Early outcomes included fairer production arrangements, greater women’s visibility, mentoring between generations, and increased youth engagement, despite limited resources and persistent gender norms. The article suggests that social workers can support rural development by linking economic growth with participation, equity, and social inclusion in marginalized communities internationally.
Self-help groups are well-established mechanisms of mutual support and collective well-being. However, their developmental role in protracted crises remains underexamined. Drawing on qualitative interviews, focus groups, and collaborative vignette analysis in eastern DRC, this study explores how women’s self-help and rotating loan groups function as solidarity networks within developmental social work. The findings highlight self-help groups as a form of crisis governance, rotating loans as both means and ends of sustainable livelihoods beyond mere survival economies, and informal peer networks as emerging sites for accidental counselling. Together, the findings reposition self-help groups as community-led welfare infrastructures, offering a globally relevant alternative to state-centric and clinical models of recovery in protracted armed conflicts and forced displacement.
Amid Singapore’s Smart Nation agenda, this study examines social workers’ attitudes, perception, concerns and readiness for AI adoption. A survey of 211 practitioners revealed cautious optimism. While AI was perceived as beneficial for adminis
This study proposes policy measures to address social isolation among middle-aged individuals through ecological systems theory. In-depth interviews with eight high-risk participants were analyzed using framework analysis, a structured form of thematic analysis, in which inductively and deductively generated themes were organized into a systematic framework to integrate detailed data description with higher-level abstraction. The findings move beyond previous research that primarily emphasized individuals’ feelings of loneliness and psychosocial support, by applying an ecological systems perspective to address social isolation among middle-aged adults in a comprehensive and structural manner. The findings yield theoretical, practice, and research implications, informing multi-level interventions.
This study presents a bibliometric analysis of disability and social work research from 2000 to 2025. Using the keywords disab* and “social work,” 211 peer-reviewed English articles were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and analyzed using VOS viewer. Co-authorship, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and keyword co-occurrence were used to analyze collaboration patterns, intellectual structure, and thematic trends. Findings show steady publication growth, influential authors and institutions in Anglo-Saxon countries, and a shift toward rights-based approaches emphasizing empowerment, inclusion, and accessibility. This study recommends expanding Global South participation, strengthening international collaboration, and promoting more inclusive and intersectional disability research in social work.
Community work is an appropriate social work intervention for addressing social ills in Zimbabwe. Despite the relevance of community work for addressing complex social issues, social workers encounter substantial institutional and structural obstacles in its implementation. This note explored the barriers that social workers face in implementing community work. The study utilised a reflective practice approach, drawing from the author’s experience in community work practice in Zimbabwe. The author found that social workers face barriers in implementing community work such as resource constraints, high caseloads and policy and institutional focus. Addressing these barriers is essential for strengthening community work practice.
Within the global professionalisation of social work, high turnover rates among practitioners have emerged as a core bottleneck constraining sectoral development. The present study investigates the relationship between collective psychological ownership and social workers’ turnover intentions, examining its underlying mechanisms. Utilising the China Social Work Longitudinal Study 2019 (N = 5438), findings demonstrate that collective psychological ownership significantly and negatively predicts turnover intentions. Depressive symptoms and job satisfaction exert a double-mediating effect between collective ownership and turnover intentions. Consequently, collective psychological ownership functions not only as a direct protective factor in stabilising the social work workforce but also as a deep-seated resource that restores individuals’ psychological health foundations and optimising professional cognitive evaluations. Theoretically, the study shifts the focus from individualistic self-care to collective agency, framing workforce stability as a structural safeguard for social justice and service users’ rights. By providing empirical evidence from a state-led expansion context, this study offers a vital theoretical foundation for decolonising social work knowledge and informs retention strategies in both collectivist and austerity-impacted welfare systems.
Fieldwork placement models are essential in social work education in Zimbabwe and abroad, as they initiate social work students into the social work profession. This practice note explored fieldwork placement models in Zimbabwe’s social work education. The paper was based on the author’s social work practice experience, which was triangulated with the literature. It was revealed that the fieldwork placement models most prevalent in Zimbabwe were block, in-service and rotational fieldwork placements, while concurrent fieldwork was more prevalent in Western countries.
This qualitative study explores social capital strategies employed by social workers in Guangzhou, China, focusing on Social Work Service Stations. Through semi-structured interviews with 30 social workers, and an analysis of 101 evaluation reports from 14 Social Work Service Stations, two key strategies—associativity and mobilization are explored. This study highlights three themes: strengthening bonding networks, broadening bridging networks and mobilizing resources in response to service users’ needs. The findings contribute to social work practice by providing a framework that integrates these strategies, offering practical insights for social workers to enhance frontline services in the Chinese context.
Treatment disengagement in mental health is often framed as an individual problem linked to lack of insight, low motivation, or ambivalence toward care. However, this perspective overlooks broader social conditions. This brief note argues that, from a social justice perspective, disengagement is understood not as “treatment refusal,” but as a consequence of structural barriers and unequal access affecting marginalized populations, including immigrants, refugees, and ethnic minorities. In this view, disengagement reflects limitations in accessibility and cultural responsiveness rather than individual unwillingness. Social work practice—through outreach, relational engagement, and structural advocacy—plays a key role in addressing these barriers and promoting more equitable mental health services.
