Relationships between professional preferences, professional training, and personal characteristics and attitudes regarding causes of poverty and ways to reduce it among social work professionals and students.

A major component of social work practice is working with people below the poverty line. In a wide variety of social services, social workers and social work trainees encounter people who live in poverty, and their attitudes towards poverty have an impact on their perceptions of the problems of the poor and their ways of coping with these issues. This study is based on the conceptual framework related to the practice of social work policy (Jansson, 2008; Weiss & Gal, 2011); it identifies the concepts relevant to this practice among students and professionals, and examines the various factors that explain the divergence between views. The study examines these issues: What are the attitudes of social workers and social work students regarding the causes of poverty and the ways to deal with it?   Are there differences in attitude between the professionals and the students, and is there a connection between the attitudes of social workers and students regarding the causes of poverty and the ways of dealing with it in terms of:  professional preferences, professional training, and personal characteristics.

The sample that was  used as the basis for this study was a convenience sample consisting of 138 social workers from different disciplines and professional experience, working in different organizations and 116 social work undergraduates attending institutions of  higher education in Israel who are at different stages of their studies, beginners and approaching graduation (first and third year students). The participants in the study were those who agreed to answer the research questionnaire that was distributed among undergraduate students and graduate students (i.e., the latter are practicing social workers) at two schools of social work and five social service departments in northern Israel. The subjects were asked to fill out the questionnaire and return it in a sealed envelope directly to the investigator. The data was collected over the course of three months.

The research tools included a positions questionnaire concerning the causes of poverty, a positions questionnaire concerning the ways to deal with poverty, a professional preferences questionnaire, a questionnaire on inner strength, a professional training questionnaire, a personal background questionnaire, and a demographic questionnaire.

In a preliminary examination of the connection between the attitudes of professionals and students to causal attributions of  poverty and their position regarding the ways to deal with it, positive correlations were found between the position that supports the social explanation and fatalistic explanation of poverty and their views on expanding government welfare programs as ways to deal with poverty,  and between the position that supports the motivational explanation and the psychological explanation of poverty and their attitude toward psychological therapy as a way to deal with poverty. A negative correlation was found between the position supporting a motivational explanation of poverty and the view on expanding welfare programs as ways to deal with it. These findings demonstrate that the social views of the subjects regarding the causes of poverty and ways to deal with it are not sufficiently strong and consolidated.

In testing the exploratory research hypothesis that related to the differences between professionals and students (first and third year)  for the   various research variables, no differences were found between the social workers and the students in their attitudes toward causes of poverty and ways of dealing with poverty, internal strength and personal experience of poverty, discrimination and social exclusion . However, the differences that were found between the groups were that social workers had more of a professional preference than students for working in the social welfare department, the government sector, and action strategy for designing social policy, and characterized more as having  a family experience of poverty, discrimination and social exclusion than third year students. They had less have of a professional preference than the students for working with adolescent boys/ girls, for the mentally ill and drug addicts, for the prison service  and mental hospitals, the business and voluntary sector, and were less qualified in individual and group work, and in designing social policy in an academic framework than first year students. In addition, differences were found between the students themselves, whereby first-year students were more likely to view therapy as a way of dealing with poverty and to have a professional preference for engaging in action strategy of designing social policy, and to have less professional preference for the government sector than third-year students.

In testing the research hypotheses,  significant positive correlations were found between the professional preference for  working with these excluded populations and the positions that support the social explanation of poverty and social positions on expanding welfare programs as ways to deal with poverty; between the personal characteristic of inner strength and the social positions of expanding welfare programs as ways of dealing with poverty;  and between the personal characteristic of having a personal experience of poverty, discrimination, and social exclusion and the fatalistic explanation of poverty. In addition, negative correlations were found between the concept of professional preference for working with excluded populations and the positions that support a motivational explanation for poverty, and between the personal characteristic of inner strength and the positions that support a psychological explanation for poverty. However, there were no correlations between the personal characteristic of inner strength and the positions that support the social explanation of poverty; between professional training and the formulation of social policy at school and work; and between personal and family experience of poverty, discrimination, and social exclusion and the positions that support a social explanation of poverty and social positions regarding ways to deal with poverty.

After an examination of the relationship between the research variables, I conducted a series of five steps of hierarchical regression analyses on each of the dependent variables. The explained variance ranged from 5% to 8%, and variables of professional experience and perception of professional preference for working with excluded populations consistently explained the difference in the social attitudes of social workers and students towards the causes of poverty and the expansion of welfare programs as ways of dealing with poverty.

These findings indicate that the conceptual theory related to policy practice can be used in part to explain positions on the causes of poverty and ways of dealing with it.

These findings have several implications; first, they contribute to the expansion of theoretical and research knowledge for practice, because there is very little knowledge about the positions of social workers and students, the factors explaining these concepts, and the differences between them. Since the hypotheses of the research were confirmed in part, future studies should consider other factors which might be relevant for examining the connections between social attitudes towards explanations for poverty and the ways to deal with it on the one hand, and  the practical activity in the field needed to achieve a policy change, on the other. Likewise, this study presents a challenge to social work schools, to reconsider their admission  procedures in selecting social worker students, those who have a preference to work with excluded populations, an attitude that predicts social positions towards the causes of poverty and ways to deal with it, and those who have the personal characteristic of inner strength which predicts social positions towards intervention methods which are desirable for coping with poverty and which are compatible with the values of the profession. In addition to consider changes in the curricula and fieldwork so that the new programs will allow students to experiment with policy practice. Moreover, places of employment, particularly those that focus on populations in distress, should make changes in the procedures of accepting suitable social workers and taking on the candidates who have a preference to work with excluded populations and candidates with personal characteristics of inner strength, which predict their social positions towards the intervention methods desirable for dealing with poverty. However, the place of employment should develop a policy of employee training in the practice of policy that will help them work with populations in distress and in training students in policy practice.