Childhood Trauma and Political Efficacy Among BSW and MSW Students in the Rural South

Background: “The professional mandate for today’s social worker includes a clear call for political advocacy on behalf of social justice” (Halvor, 2016, p. 289). Since social workers first need to be psychologically engaged before participating in the political arena, the concept of political efficacy (PE) is intrinsically tied to policy advocacy and practice (Ritter, 2008). While little is known about what influences social work (SW) students’ PE (Halvor, 2016), research shows a direct link between childhood experience and adult political behavior; as well as between childhood trauma and adult political ideology (Campbell, 2006; DeNeve, 2013; Settle, Bond, & Levitt, 2011). Given that SW students experience childhood trauma at a rate three times higher than that of the general population (Thomas, 2016), we hypothesized childhood trauma would impact SW students’ sense of PE later in adulthood.

Methods: The study used a convenience sample of 168 SW students at a rural, southeastern public university (age M=27.7; 95% females). The dependent variables are the internal and the external PE of SW students, each measured on a summated scale. Higher scores on both scales indicate greater PE. External efficacy is one’s expectations about government responsiveness; internal efficacy is one’s own political competence (Niemi, et al., 1991). The predictors are childhood trauma measured by the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire (ACE; Felitti et al., 1998) and the demographic characteristics of students, including age, race, gender, SES, marital status, and parental education level. Analyses were conducted using OLS and ordinal logistic regression in STATA15.

Results: Overall, OLS results showed that higher ACE scores, indicating greater occurrences of early trauma, were significantly associated with lower external PE (β=0.12, p <0.10, n=107). Childhood trauma was not associated with internal PE. These findings stand in contrast to prior research which found early-trauma survivors to exhibit resilience and flexibility in political ideology. Ordinal logistic regression results show that an additional event of childhood trauma significantly decreased the odds of feeling externally efficacious (i.e., “having a say in what government does”) versus the combined feelings of inefficaciousness and indifference, ceteris paribus (p <0.05, n=104). Interestingly, SW students with highly-educated mothers (college+) were less likely to feel internally efficacious (i.e., “having a pretty good understanding of important political issues”) compared to peers whose mothers had less than college education, ceteris paribus (p <0.05, n=107).  

Implications: The results of this study can inform SW education, practice, and research. First, it suggests that SW students who have experienced childhood trauma and violence may self-screen themselves out from political advocacy work due to their beliefs that they "do not have a say" in government matters. SW educators can use ACE screening to assist students in better understanding how early trauma can have lasting effects on political beliefs. Based on this realization, practitioners must address how past trauma influences their ability to effectively engage in political advocacy for clients. Lastly, researchers seeking to understand political involvement of social workers might further explore the experiences of childhood trauma and their relationship to political behavior of social workers.