Concept Mapping: Engaging Diversity and Difference in Practice Conceptualized

Background and Purpose: There is a clear need to better understand how social work faculty and field instructors conceptualize student’s achievements of the core competency, engaging diversity and difference in practice. Examining this issue from the perspective of those charged with teaching and assessing students’ performance is essential to understanding how this competency is operationalized in social work education practice. This study examined conceptualizations of students’ demonstration of engaging diversity from the perspective of social work faculty and field instructors. The  research questions were: (1) How do social work faculty and field instructors conceptualize and assess student’s engaging diversity and difference in practice?; (2) How do faculty and field instructors’ conceptualizations of student’s engaging diversity and difference in practice differ based on role?

Methods:  Concept Mapping methodology, a participatory, mixed method approach, was used to generate and translate complex qualitative data into visual maps of concepts through multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. These maps display interrelationships of the elements of conceptual meaning from stakeholders’ perspectives. Pattern matching compared the degree to which faculty without field liaison responsibility, faculty with field liaison responsibility, and field instructors’ conceptualizations are similar. The study was conducted in six phases: planning and design, idea generation, sorting, rating, data analysis, interpretation and implementation. A stratified recruitment method was used to promote diversity of the participant pool.

 Brainstorming participants (n=15) generated 30 statements that after redundant and compound concepts were resolved arrived at 47 conceptual statements. Participants (n=28) sorted statements into thematic categories, rated (n=35) the importance of each statement to student's demonstration of engaging diversity and difference in practice using a Likert scale, how difficult or easy each statement is to assess related to student's using a Likert scale (n=23); and rated each statement, yes, if they adequately assess student’s performance related to the statement or, no, if they do not or it is not in their purview of instruction (n=25).

 Results: In collaboration with stakeholders, a computer-generated ten-cluster solution was determined to be the most conceptually sound and provided the optimum level of specificity and richness. Thematic categories were: Active Classroom Engagement, Class-based Discussion/Reflection. Institutional Engagement, Social Engagement, Research Analysis, Knowledge Acquisition, Community Based Activities, Self-reflection, Integration, Field Engagement. Faculty without field responsibilities and field instructors were more dissimilar to each other than either of them were to faculty with field responsibilities. 

 Implications: This study provides a conceptual framework for operationalizing engaging diversity and difference in practice for the purpose of informing curriculum development, teaching methods and designing assessment tools. The individual and thematic elements provide potential markers for consideration for improving teaching and evaluation of students’ acquisition of engaging diversity and difference in practice. The generated elements could be used as a checklist to evaluate whether the social work education curriculum allows students demonstration opportunities for each of the elements.  Additionally, the ratings of the statements can be used to identify assessment needs and priorities. They also present opportunities for deeper analysis of social work faculty and field instructors’ roles.