We Can Do Better: Mitigating Negatively, Racialized Attitudes in Child Welfare through Self-Awareness

Background: This research addresses a key question about social workers and the understanding of how to mitigate racial bias. Can an educational program for child welfare service providers decrease their racial biases, and increase their awareness, and use of the race-based lenses they use in evaluating minoritized families who come in contact with child welfare agencies?

Methods: This investigation utilized a quasi-experimental research design, which allowed for the examination of the influence of the intervention Knowing Your Lens Awareness Training (KYLAT) on social worker/caseworker’s racialized attitude as demarcated by Racial Privilege (RP), Institutional Discrimination (ID), and Blatant Racial Issues (BRI), subscales of the Color Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS). The Solomon Four-Group Design was utilized in this investigation.

KYLAT, which allows social workers to begin to manage the influence of personal biases and values when engaging with minoritized families, is a 3-4 hour educational, self-awareness, learning module created by the researcher, modeled after existing research, and inclusive of the tenets of transformative dialogue.  

A convenience sample of N=138 social/case workers from a mid-western state included the following self-identified, racial/ethnic diversity, which reflects the national social work demographic of approximately 85% white female: White-American (n=118), Black-American (n=1), Asian-American (n= 3), Native-American (n=1), Latinx (n=1), Bi-racial (n=6), Hispanic(n=5), Missing (n=1). Of this sample there were 11 males and 126 females. The majority of participants identified as social workers.

Results: Key findings were determined by using both a One-Way Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), and Paired T-Tests.  The ANCOVA used total posttest CoBRAS scores, RP, BRI and ID posttest CoBRAS scores as dependent variables, and the Paired T-Tests used the same variables to examine differences between pretest and posttest scores.

Both analyses indicated a decrease in posttest scores, which suggest an increase in awareness of colorblind racial attitudes in the areas of RP and BRI.  Just as ID was impervious to the educational intervention provided by the creators of the CoBRAS, ID was also impervious to KYLAT.   

 

Implications: If negative, implicit attitudes about race are amendable, decision-making based on negative implicit attitudes about race are potentially amendable too. Hence, it may be possible to bring about changes in child welfare social worker/caseworker decision-making.

The Council of Social Work Education 2015 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards have already provided the necessary foundation to improve decision-making capabilities within social workers by way of competency-based education.  

Competency 2 – Engage Diversity and Difference in Practice- and the behaviors which define it must receive greater emphasis.  The third behavior specifies - self-awareness should be applied toward management of the influence of personal biases and values when working with diverse clients.

• This behavior should:
  • Receive intentional emphasis throughout social work generalist curricula
  • Be directed toward students who:
    • Receive the Title IV-E Child Welfare Stipend
    • Have an emphasis in:
      • Child Welfare
      • Children, youth and families
• This can be achieved by:
  • Infusing segments of KYLAT into child welfare courses
  • Transforming KYLAT into a 14 week course
  • Making KYLAT part of the core Child Welfare curricula.