Other studies investigate social work ethics in terms of students’ developing affiliation and identification with social work and its goals. Miller (2013)** explores values through a lens of professional socialisation. She argues that this spans the ‘explicit and implicit curricula’, the latter comprising the ‘values, attitudes and
norms’ of a given profession and being under-researched in social work (p.369). Miller goes on to report a study that surveyed attitudes towards their profession of 489 participants, including social work students at different stages of their professional education and one and five years after graduation. The study is broad in its scope and not all its findings are pertinent here. However, Miller found that age was positively correlated with adherence to social work values, men were more idealistic than women, and participants with a higher adherence to professional values tended to be less inclined to seek managerial positions. She also found that participants tended not to report career choice being influenced by personal experience. Here, she concurs with Hansen and McCullagh (1995) but not Singletary (2006) and Wilson and McCrystal (2007). Like Limb and Organista (2003), she found black participants more committed to social work values than others. The details of Miller’s results compound rather than clarify questions about relationships between values and demographic characteristics, suggesting again a ‘textured weave’ (D’Cruz et al. 2002, p.164). Nevertheless, the concept of an implicit curriculum usefully highlights the potentially transformative nature of social work education, in that students are not simply learning, but becoming.
Other studies explore students’ developing ethical congruence with social work by investigating their values. Of these eight are quantitative, including seven from the US. Some address attitudes towards particular oppressed groups (Hancock, Waites and Klederas, 2012**; Lennon-Dearing and Delavega, 2015**); others focus more on specific practice or societal issues (Finn, 2002**; Johnson et al. 2006**; Carney and McCarren, 2012*; Miller and Hayward, 2014**; Prior and Quinn, 2012**; Wong and
Yuen, 2013**). Given their use of survey-based methods, and with participant numbers ranging from 58 to 378, these studies do not give access to ethical meaning for individual participants. This means that despite the good quality of some of them, they are of limited relevance for the present study. However, three noteworthy points emerge. One is the significance for some participants of particular service user characteristics. In the US, Lennon-Dearing and Delavega (2015, p.418) investigated student and qualified social workers’ ‘attitudes and behaviors positive toward the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community and rejection of legislation discriminating against this population.’ While they found the level of acceptance high in both participant groups, students were less accepting than qualified practitioners. The authors recommend greater attention to social justice and cultural competence, both before and after professional qualification. Their study also suggests that the process of becoming a social worker may entail existing values being challenged – or at least, coming to be differently reported. The second point arising from this group of studies is the varied relationships between social work values and faith/spirituality. Conceptualising the latter as ‘connectedness’, Prior and Quinn (p.174) hypothesised that it would correlate negatively with values of social justice but found that this was not the case. This concurs with studies above with regard to motivation (Chappell-Deckert and Canda, 2016; Singletary, 2006), which equally reported a sound fit between participants’ faith and their career ambitions. Johnson et al. (2006) found otherwise. Noting US arguments that Evangelical and other religiously conservative social workers were inaccurately characterised as hostile towards gay and poor people (Hodge, 2003, cited in Johnson et al.), the authors devised a ‘religiosity scale’ (p.175). Using this alongside Pike’s
Values Inventory (1996, cited in Johnson et al. 2006), developed specifically for pedagogic use, they found that religiously conservative participants scored less highly on the values index than others. Thus, it seems that any consideration of the relationship between social work and spiritual values must take account of specific beliefs and attitudes. Third, Finn (2002) and Miller and Hayward (2014) investigated attitudes and actions with regard to online psychotherapeutic intervention and environmental issues respectively, with Miller and Hayward concluding that ‘environmental literacy’ (Jones, 2010, cited in Miller and Hayward, p.190) is a useful concept for social work educators. Together, these studies suggest, like others in the previous chapter, the broadening field of ethics in social work.
Four qualitative studies throw greater light on the lived experience of values and values acquisition. In Greece, Dedotsi, Young and Broadhurst 2016)** interviewed 14 social work students at the end of their studies in a grounded theory study investigating anti-oppressive values in the climate of the Greek economic crisis. They express concern at students’ individualistic responses to structural issues, in particular a tendency to blame oppressed service users for their predicament. Three UK studies together offer a more nuanced perspective. In Scotland, Woodward and McKay (2012)** used written responses to vignettes and focus groups to explore undergraduate students’ understanding of social work values at the beginning and end of their first year of study. Noting Higham’s individual, structural and emancipatory value dimensions (Higham, 2006, cited in Woodward and McKay), the authors found students at the second data collection point applying values to work with individuals, but less able to challenge structural disadvantage. Woodward and
McKay conclude that while values may be more difficult to write than talk about, social justice is an essential value to uphold as a defence against prevalent neoliberal practice contexts. Hughes (2011)** conducted an appreciative inquiry with five undergraduate students nearing qualification in England, using interviews and an interactive workshop. The study touches only briefly on social work ethics, but offers the useful pedagogic insight that challenges to personal values, while exciting and transformative, are potentially unsettling. Hughes notes the importance for educators of recognising and supporting the transformative process students are undergoing, and assisting by modelling appropriate values and behaviour. This suggests that role models may be ethically significant not only in shaping career motivation, as noted above (Singletary, 2006; Wilson and McCrystal, 2007), but also with regard to their role in consolidating this once students are engaged in their professional education. Wiles (2013)** interviewed seven final year students to identify the discourses they used in discussing their developing professional identity, as part of a larger study investigating the meanings for students of the [then] new regulatory requirements for the profession. She categorised discourses that variously conceptualise identity as a professional trait, a feature of the professional community, and as work in progress. Adherence to professional values and ethics are noted by participants as elements of the first two of these, with tension between personal and professional values an aspect of the third. Usefully echoing Osteen (2011) but with regard to England, Wiles concludes that in her research professional identity emerged as a complex concept, with its development dynamic and multi- faceted. She also highlights the tension participants describe between their personal lives and their developing social work persona, with one student describing having
become ‘poles apart’ from [non-social work] friends (p.861). Wiles reports that this is articulated in part as a clash between different social classes, and contextualises this finding in literature relating similar issues in professions other than social work. As Wiles notes, while her methodological approach enables insight into resources provided for participants by shared discourses, it does not provide a similar richness in respect of individual participants’ contributions. Relevant for educators, however, and echoing Miller (2013) she recommends that opportunities be provided for students to explore the complex professional identity formation they are experiencing and to recognise that it is an ongoing process rather than an event. She also raises the issue of possible advantages for students of opportunities for reflection outside assessed tasks – although her vision of TCSW offering a useful practice community proved short-lived.
Two studies explore the relationship between personal and professional values from a cross-cultural perspective. In a Canadian study, Calderwood et al. (2009)** carried out semi-structured interviews with five social work students and two recent graduates social work graduates who had moved to Canada as adults, from countries of origin including Bangladesh, Grenada, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland and Somalia. The researchers found a broad consistency between participants’ home and Canadian values, and between their home values and those they encountered in the course of their social work education. A notable exception was that participants reported that their home values placed greater emphasis than they found in Canada on the importance of family. The general sense was that participants’ home values both prioritised the family’s needs over their own and regarded family networks as a
source of support and welfare. Conversely, participants characterised ‘the Western way’ as being ‘all about me’ (p.117). Chung (2006)*, describing group discussions with 10 Asian American social work students, concluded that participants experienced a lack of validation for their inherent cultural characteristics. In particular, their tendency to be unassertive was viewed as a deficit, rather than a feature of the modesty and deference that they had been brought up to cultivate. Participants also described the difficulties they experienced when expected to challenge older people, given their ingrained respect for elders. Chung concludes that awareness of educational racism, and supporting ethnic minority students in reframing cultural traits within the requirements of the social work role, may enable them to develop what they have to offer their chosen profession. She acknowledges that her insider status may compromise her results, drawn in part from student accounts of group discussions she herself facilitated, given the traits of compliance and deference she has identified as present in her participants. Nonetheless, her study raises important questions about how far professional norms reflect dominant values, and thus the unrecognised ethical challenge ethnic minority students may face.
This section of the chapter concludes with studies whose perspective on social work ethics is professional identity formation. Three are quantitative, including two Israeli studies that draw on the same data to investigate the parts played by supervision, personal resources including empathy, and values in the development of professional identity. Shlomo, Levy and Itzhaky (2012)**, having administered questionnaires to 160 final year undergraduate students in Israel, concluded that
students’ satisfaction with supervision, together with their personal values, made a direct contribution. However, they also found that where satisfaction with supervision was low, other factors – social values including co-operation and helpfulness towards others – might then play a compensatory role. The authors note the limited scope of their study, including its sample from one course at one point in time and the variables that were not included, and recommend further research. Nonetheless, their articulation of the ‘systems of resources in the students’ environment’ (p.249) and the flexible relationship between them, points to the individually varied and dynamic nature of professional identity. In a further paper (Levy, Shlomo and Itzhaky, 2014**) the same authors illustrate this further, subjecting their data to complex path analysis and devising a figure to show the multi-directional relationships between the factors and domains. In this tripartite model, ‘inputs’ – satisfaction with supervision and personal resources – contribute to the development of ‘throughputs’ – values and empathy (p.754). The complexity and individuality of professional identity formation articulated by these studies suggests that qualitative approaches might be well suited to explore it further, although the authors do not suggest this. Osteen (2011), in his investigation of the motivations of 20 US students discussed above, also throws useful light on identity, by qualitative means. Osteen notes that the relationship between personal and professional identities has been variously construed in terms of which is dominant (Archer, 2001, and Wenger et al. 2002, cited in Osteen). In order to explore this, he includes an interview question that asks participants whether they regard themselves as social workers. Responses lead Osteen (2011) to differentiate integrated, non-integrated and evolving identities, explicated by participants in the context of rich personal
accounts that suggest that identity reflects individual understanding and experience and sometimes an ambivalent relationship with the profession. This echoes Christie and Kruk (1998), who had found that not all SWS intended using their qualification to practice social work at all. Osteen also highlights, with Wiles (2013) that personal and professional value congruence does not necessarily mean that students do not experience difficulties: illustrating this, one participant reports the challenges presented by encounters with her racist homophobic family.