Increasing Self Efficacy of Legislative Advocacy Among Social Work Students

Background and Purpose: Legislative advocacy is an integral part of social work practice. Training students to engage in legislative advocacy is important because of the oppression, discrimination, marginalization, and inequality present in the lives of clients.  The literature suggests that experiential activities are better suited to prepare social work students to become policy practitioners (Beimers, 2015; DeRigne, Rosenwald & Naranjo, 2014).  Educationally based political activities can educate students about the political process and increase legislative advocacy. Legislative Education and Advocacy Day (LEAD) is an example of a policy-focused partnership between schools of social work and the Florida chapter of the NASW.  Students travel to the State Capitol to learn how to advocate for issues important to social work and engage in the political process by meeting with legislators and witnessing committee proceedings. 

Methods: The current study explored changes in attitudes and self-efficacy of social justice and legislative advocacy from a pre-to-post evaluation of LEAD activities.  The convenience sample comprised of 649 BSW & MSW students from 14 different Schools/Programs in Florida who participated in the pretest and 209 students who participated in the posttest.  A 20 item index was created for the purpose of this study and included elements of the Social Justice Scale, Social Issues Advocacy Scale-2, and the Internal Political Efficacy Scale.  The index measured attitudes towards and self-efficacy with social justice and legislative advocacy on a 5 point Likert scale. Prior to LEAD activities, the researchers collected pretest data in person and again (posttest) via Survey Monkey within 1 month following LEAD.  

Results: Pretest-posttest results suggest minimal to nonexistent gains in attitudes towards social justice and legislative advocacy.  This suggests that prior to and after LEAD, students had a fair amount of positive attitudes towards social justice and legislative advocacy. CSWE mandates content on social and economic justice.  Thus, students favorably responding to the belief that advocating for human rights at the individual and system levels is important was expected.  Students were able to make significant gains in self-efficacy with legislative advocacy through their LEAD experience, where the mean score on this index significantly increased from pretest M=20.71, SD=5.29 (range 0-30) to posttest M=23.00, SD=2.76 (range 0-30), t (207) =-5.15, p<.001.

Conclusions and Implications: LEAD was successful in building student self-efficacy with legislative advocacy.  This increased confidence will benefit students as they continue to promote the mission of social work.  Having ample preparation in skills development and experience during school can help promote increased competence as students continue to advocate legislatively after graduation (Derigne et al., 2014).  These findings highlight the need for comprehensive training and experiential practice with legislative advocacy among both BSW and MSW students. Activities such as NASW sponsored LEAD are critical for students to build competency in policy practice.     

Beimers, D. (2015). NASW involvement in legislative advocacy. Journal of Policy Practice, 14(3-4), 256-

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DeRigne, L., Rosenwald, M., & Naranjo, F. A. (2014). Legislative advocacy and social work Education:

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