Promoting Financial Capability within the Field of Social Work Practice Among Families with Children: A Systematic Review

Background: Financial difficulties have a severe impact on families and children who grow up in poor families. Compared with higher-income families, poor families are less able to financially invest in their children, which is known to impair children’s cognitive development and social relationships. Social workers can help families address their financial problems through a variety of practice settings, hence simultaneously promoting financial well-being. It is important to ensure that the methods and interventions for social work clients are operative. As social work clients’ financial concerns can be complex and are often intertwined with psychosocial stressors, we synthesize and analyze the methods and interventions in relation to the intersection between financial and psychosocial factors. We investigate how financial capability among families with children has been promoted in social work practice.

Method: We generated a systematic review by following the PRISMA standards. We searched Ebsco (SocINDEX With Full Text and Academic Search Premier), ProQuest (Social Science Database and Sociology Database), Web of Science and Scopus. A total of 277 articles were identified. The software program Covidence was used to structure the selection. In total, 14 empirical articles were included and analyzed applying the concepts of the CAIMeR theory.

Results: We found there was a large understanding about the phenomenon, but the knowledge of contexts was limited, with a lack of evidence-based knowledge. Formal interventions in social work practice emphasize financial education as a key contributor to financial capability. Likewise, the improvement of financial inclusion is underlined. The literature indicates that interventions provide tools for clients to help strengthen economic self-sufficiency and increase financial confidence. However, social work practices often concentrate on money management, ignoring the ways in which clients can increase income and other resources or avoid future risks.

Conclusions and Implications: Formal interventions and methods themselves in social work practice to promote financial capability are twofold. These emphasize financial education as a key contributor to financial capability. A variety of tailored programmes are intended to increase financial knowledge and skills through educational goals. At the same time, enhancing financial inclusion is highlighted. Interventions are integrated through strengthening accessibility and suitability in services. Interventions and methods in the broader literature demonstrate that improving financial capability in financially vulnerable families is not only a matter of impacting individual behaviour and literacy, but also a matter of changing institutions and impacting financial opportunities to act.

There is a lack of strong evidence, especially for mechanisms such as psychosocial elements of support. However, certain psychosocial elements of support, such as trust in the person delivering the intervention, are named in the literature as impacting the elements in the implementation of the programmes. Scholars have repeatedly discussed factors such as the client’s inner trust and confidence towards the programme impacting the implementation. These studies imply that psychosocial elements of support can facilitate the success of the intervention. Thus, the knowledge of interventions and methods is important in social work, but equally important is knowing how to use the methods in the right way.