![[ Visit Client Website ]](images/banner.gif)
Background and purpose: The purpose of the research is to assess the differential reliability and validity of the Preparation for Graduate Social Work Education (PGSWE) Scale. Preparation for graduate social work education is defined as the extent to which college-educated adults are prepared to adequately assimilate and negotiate the social, psychological, and cognitive aspects of a graduate school environment to complete an accredited MSW Program. It is a crucial issue related to the future professional social work labor force and its diverse constituency. The NASW Center for Workforce Studies has documented the challenges the U.S. is facing having appropriately-trained personnel in place to respond to the needs of an increasingly large and diverse population. The PGSWE Scale has three domains--social, psychological, and cognitive. The six PGSWE subscales are the Career Development Subscale, the Job Factor Subscale, the Graduate Network Subscale, the Perceived Fairness of Treatment Subscale, the Undergraduate Preparation Subscale, and the Graduate learning Difficulty Subscale. Several subscales have been used in previous research with smaller sample and are explained in the literature.
Methods: Primary data were collected using the PGSWE Survey from a purposive sample continuously over an 84-month period. The PGSWE Scale is a 69-item instrument developed to identify institutional and individual factors in former graduate students' personal, professional, and educational histories that may have a significant influence with specific types of graduate school outcomes. African American (N=343) and White MSW graduates (N=677) respondents were from graduate programs in 21 different states. Most were undergraduate social work majors (35%), followed by psychology (22%) and sociology (11.7%).
Results: Differential reliability and validity was assessed by race and gender, and subgroups had stronger reliability with specific subscales, while others did not. Generally speaking, there was a wide dispersion and range of alpha scores, ranging from .56 for Black females on the Graduate Network Scale, to .86 for White males on the Career Development Subscale. The analysis included a rank ordering of PGSWE subscale coefficients, and a reliability variance analysis for the different study cohorts and subgroups.
The key Graduate Difficulty Learning Scale variables were differentially-paired with hypothesized demographic and other PGSWE subscale variables. Almost 36% of the hypothesized correlates for the White cohort and 28% of the hypothesized correlates for the Black cohort were significant, thus a level of differential criterion-related validity was established.
Conclusions and Implications: The differential validity and reliability analysis has significant implications for social work education, especially as it relates to understanding factors that attract people to the social work education, keeps them there, and impacts their specific career choices. Since the PGSWE Scale can be tailored to have universal applicability across cultures and ethnic groups as well, the study also has important implications in terms of solutions to the continued lack of diverse representation in social work education classrooms, and preparation of an ethnically-diverse workforce to work with the unprecedented diversity expected in American society's future.