Adaptability and Innovation: A Qualitative Extension of the 2014 National School Social Work Survey

Background/Purpose

The 2014 National School Social Work Survey aimed to update knowledge of school social work (SSW) practice by examining how practitioner characteristics, practice contexts and practice choices have evolved since the last national survey (2008).  Survey results showed the field still lags behind calls to implement evidence-informed and data-driven interventions.  Further, research (e.g., Dupper, 2014) shows that SSW practitioner role definition and practice focus remains persistently oriented towards individual intervention rather than school-wide preventative services. The need to better understand these findings led the survey team to collect focus group data, in order to investigate how SSWs define their roles, relate to various policy imperatives, and work with practice innovations.

Methods

We used focus group methods to explore practitioners’ role definition, their use of evidence-informed, data-driven interventions and their professional learning needs. Survey respondents were invited to participate in focus groups held at a nationally-advertised professional development session in 2014.  54 individuals from 6 states participated, ranging in experience from 1 to 29 years.  Focus groups had 6-8 participants, sorted by years of experience and employing school type (e.g., elementary, secondary).   The team analyzed transcripts using qualitative coding software. We used codes derived from this study’s objectives, and also identified emergent themes in the data.  Two authors established inter-rater reliability (exceeding a Cohen’s Kappa of .8) before coding all transcripts.

Results

Participants generally defined their roles in reactive, rather than assertive, ways.  They read their schools’ general working conditions (e.g., the SSW-student ratio, schools’ priorities and culture, community characteristics), adapted to impinging policies (e.g., special education requirements), and imperatives from school and district leadership.  Participant responses to these demands led to highly varied role definition.

While most participants were amenable to data-driven, evidence-based and universal interventions, they reported a lack of access to needed training and to interventions that fit their school’s needs.  They also encountered logistical barriers to implementing these interventions in their schools.  Participants’ descriptions of these interventions reflected an inaccurate understanding of them.  Participants recognized gaps in their knowledge related to practice demands, but tended to turn most to peers, who seemed to provide encouragement and support rather than actionable, accurate information.  

Conclusions/Implications:

Participants reported individually adapting to school-level imperatives, but this strategy did not serve them well when faced with demands to use innovative SSW practices in the complex settings of K-12 schools. Our findings suggest that practitioners’ adaptability exists alongside the absence of a coherent, feasible set of set of school-specific practices that could orient practitioners.   As such, practitioner adaptability and practice innovation have little to do with one another.  An approach that capitalizes on adaptability while harnessing it to innovation may be more productive. Further development of school-specific interventions is needed to ensure that innovative practices are responsive to and ultimately used in school settings.  Professional learning opportunities that support the use of these interventions stand to fill practitioners’ knowledge gaps and support adaptation without compromising the practices’ effectiveness.