Social Workers Perspectives on Their Practice with Children and Families Living in Poverty

Background: Tackling poverty and its repercussions for communities and individuals and supporting people living in poverty have long been recognized as a core mission of social work (Global Definition of Social Work, IFSW, 2014). Social workers often struggle to address the impact of poverty on families and children with whom they work and instead they tend to focus on distinct problems (e.g., risk assessment, parental guidance, addiction). This ‘poverty-blindness’ has led to various attempts to develop poverty-aware and anti-poverty practices. However, these attempts mainly focus on practice undertaken in special programs and not as integral part of public social services. Thus, there is lack of knowledge about what frontline social workers do in their practice and what is the relationship between social workers’ perceptions regarding poverty, the organizational context, and their practices.

The goal of this exploratory study is to describe social workers perspectives about their practice with families living in poverty and to examine relationships between attitudes and use of professional principles, theories and models.

Methods: The convenience sample includes 83 experienced social workers currently working in Departments of Social Services in Israel that responded to an on-line survey using an anonymous Google Forms platform. Closed-ended items were constructed on the basis of an extensive literature review conducted by a group of international researchers (https://iaober.org/) and include background information, and series of items about: attitudes and use of professional principles and services and use of models and approaches in their practice.

Results: Significantly higher weight was put on participants’ own values and attitudes (e.g., social justice) compared to their assessments of attitudes of their organizations. Contrary, they significantly put lower weight on procedural aspects of practice compared to what they perceive as their organizations’. We found significantly higher reports of implementing interpersonal principles (e.g. respect and empathy to clients) than rights-based principles (e.g. upholding the right to adequate income or housing). Additionally, agencies and services with which they partner most frequently were child-centered services (e.g., daycare centers), while partnership with services addressing poverty (e.g., writ of execution), were reported less often. They also report using more approaches such as strength-based, systems approach and integrative social work and less use of psycho-dynamic and CBT. Partnership and collaboration are central components of their interventions and writing letters and applications on behalf of clients are central skills. Yet, their use of financial literacy and research skills are never or rarely used. Finally, 50% of the participants never took a course on poverty during their academic studies.

Implications: Our findings highlight the gap between social workers’ aspirations to address social injustice in their practice and their difficulty to do so within their organizational context. While their use of skills and theories predominantly support them in addressing poverty, it seems they need more training and education on poverty aware practice to better connect social work values to their everyday practice.