Development and Validation of the Field Instructor Supervision Scale 2.0

Background and Purpose

Social work educators seek to create learning environments that allow students to develop strong professional skills prior to entering the profession.  Field instructors play a central role in facilitating this goal.  In the mid-1970s, researchers began investigating the nature of the student-field instructor relationship and its relation to several outcomes, such as student satisfaction.  While these studies have made important contributions to the literature on field education, they did not use a validated scale to measure field education supervision quality.

Our presentation addresses social work’s grand challenge of advancing long and productive lives. The quality of services we provide rests on the quality of our workforce.  And, workforce quality depends on the preparation and well-being of social work students and their supervisors. 

In this presentation we describe the development and validation of the Field Instructor Supervision Scale 2.0 (FISS 2.0).  These studies included undergraduate and graduate students in micro and macro placements. 

Methods and Results

Study 1 – 2013-2014: We created a pool of items using survey questions from nine schools of social work.  Based on the final pool, we hypothesized the scale included two dimensions: developmental support (field instructor behaviors that help students meet their personal or professional needs) and task support (field instructor behaviors that help students learn about an activity or how to complete it).  Examples of developmental support include actively listening, being open, and challenging students to grow.  Examples of task support include providing enough direction and clearly stating expectations.

We pilot tested the scale with 168 students, using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and conducted qualitative analysis of students’ perceptions of behaviors that facilitated or interfered with their learning.  We used grounded theory to identify core supervisory behaviors and content analysis to summarize the frequency in which behaviors occurred.  Students identified three important field instructor behaviors that were not adequately captured in the scale: encouraged autonomy, was available, and showed me how to do something.  These items were added to the FISS 2.0.

Study 2 – 2015:  We tested the factor structure of the revised scale, using EFA, and calculated the internal consistency of the scale.  This sample included 173 students.  The two hypothesized dimensions were supported by the EFA: developmental support (8 items; Alpha=.94) and task support (8 items; Alpha=.94). 

Conclusion and Implications

High quality field instruction is the foundation for social workers’ early career development and will likely influence the quality of field instruction they provide to their students over their careers.  A validated supervision scale can help ensure student engagement in field and a productive, high quality career foundation.  The results provide preliminary evidence for a two-dimension supervision scale which field education programs can use to evaluate the quality of supervision their students are receiving.  Researchers can also use the scale to further examine the relation between supervision and student learning and preparation for professional practice. In future studies we will test the factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis [CFA]) and construct validity with validated self-efficacy scales, using new samples of students.