Equipping Social Workers for a New Global Era

The pandemic impacted the global communities at the core of its socio-economic fabric and several of the social institutions fell apart for lack of coordinated and informed approach to social work and services. Heightened vulnerabilities and increasing inequalities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic pose serious challenges to the profession of social work. Beyond the current pandemic, the possibility of such economic, social, health, and environmental crises necessitates the need for developing newer tools in addressing inequalities and enhanced vulnerabilities for marginalised communities to uphold the avowed principles of social justice and promoting human agency by social work profession. The need for some generic foundational skills as well as specific social work skills is pronounced now than ever before. With the pervasiveness of digital work in a (post)-COVID era, social work profession too is witnessing integration of digitalisation of social work necessitating social workers to develop required skills to operate in such contexts. Adoption of a paradigm where socialising the digital rather than digitising the social is considered to be re-emphasising the value of human relationships in social work practice. The need for developing necessary skills through both class room teaching and field instruction is highlighted. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Digitalizing social work education: preparing students to engage with twenty-first century practice need

This study, designed to surface student conceptions of digital development throughout their professional training, concluded mid-2019. Whilst mentioned in brief in a previous publication, this paper reports the work in full. The learning from it is important to formulating a response to practice changes driven by Covid19. Practice shifts that forced the profession to do social work at a distance, at speed, and largely through a screen. While not to dismiss efforts to adjust to the restrictions put in place to mitigate the spread of the virus, the lack of digital capabilities across the profession meant that the pivot to online practices presented significant and avoidable challenges. Informed by student descriptions of an educational experience devoid of digital development, this paper offers a solution. The ‘Digitalising Social Work Education Framework' provides a context in which to review the facilitation of digital capabilities development. It is a means to ensuring that curriculum design, content, and delivery equips students to use technologies for their learning and in practice. It avoids reducing digital professionalism to a set of technical skills and promotes the need to engage with the realities of sociotechnical practices, including those that erode people's privacy, rights and freedom from interference.

Learning from the coronavirus pandemic about the future of family support services: A focus group study with parents and professionals

Background: The onset of the coronavirus pandemic created diverse stressors for families with small children such as isolation, limited public and private childcare options, and balancing work and childcare. Fear of the future, feelings of uncertainty and loneliness led to a rise in mental health problems. Public family support services also faced significant challenges: while families felt more need for support, established means of reaching families and providing services were severely curtailed. Objectives: The current study aimed at capturing pandemic-related changes in family needs and at documenting experiences in the use of newly developed analog and digital services provided by public family support institutions in the city of Hamburg, Germany. Materials and methods: We conducted focus groups with staff members of different types of public family support services and parents who were using these services. Central topics of discussion were pandemic-related experiences and ideas for the future of public family support services. Results: Results confirm an increase in family pressures. Parents and staff members missed low-threshold accessibility of services and personal contact and dialogue. Creative approaches to complement services digitally were developed. Several of these approaches were considered beneficial, especially for reaching new target groups and strengthening interprofessional cooperation in the field. Conclusions: In-person support services need to be upheld. However, digital services can effectively complement analog formats. A successful combination requires effective resource distribution and staff member qualification measures. © 2022, The Author(s).

Digital Intervention, COVID-19, and Critical Realism: Toward a Science of Digital Social Work

The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the pace of the digital transition process in which we have been immersed. In a context of generalized lock-down, our organizations have been forced to go digital and many of the activities social workers perform must now be done remotely. As a result, e-social work, or digital social work, has gone from being an emerging specialization to a critical specialty across organizations and activities. In this article, we examine some basic scientific and methodological foundations to develop a science of social work from the perspective of critical realism, with special attention to digitalization. Establishing the scientific foundations of digital social work is a preliminary step for its development as a field of specialization. © 2021, Western Michigan University. All rights reserved.

Domesticating Technology in Pandemic Social Work

On March 12th, 2020 the Norwegian government announced what later became known as ‘the lockdown' of Norway due to the outbreak of COVID-19. This led to major changes in society, in which social distancing became the ‘new normal' in everyday life. For social workers, this meant adapting to ‘new' social problems among vulnerable groups, as well as comprehensive changes in their working conditions and interactions with clients. Many social workers communicated with clients on digital platforms before the pandemic, but Norway's COVID-19 social distancing policies changed the terms for using these platforms. This article investigates the impact of the pandemic on the ways Norwegian social workers involve themselves with digital technology in their interactions with clients. We employ domestication theory to investigate how social workers shape and navigate these new circumstances triggered by the pandemic, using a three-dimensional model that includes practical, symbolic and cognitive levels of analysis. The data underlying this article consist of 16 semi-structured interviews with social workers from seven different social services in Norway. The interviews were conducted approximately one month after the lockdown. The digital transformation within Norwegian social services, together with the changes related to the pandemic, has created new ways of practicing social work. One of the key findings concerns how social workers co-produce and adapt the use of technology to what they believe is important in interactions with their clients. In this adaption, they seek to preserve core values related to social work practices and professional development. The changes in working methods and approaches due to COVID-19 restrictions have also challenged the traditional understanding of roles and priorities underlying social work practices. In this process, new ways of digital interactions were developed. © 2021. All Rights Reserved.