Session: Harassment and Discrimination at Social Work Conferences: A Critical Feminist Rapid Response Project (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

Background: When reports of text-based sexual harassment at a late fall 2022 national social work conference emerged on Twitter, followed by other complaints about discrimination and biased behavior, social work academics quickly realized that there were longstanding issues that needed to be addressed. While professional organizations worked to ensure that policies and procedures were in place to respond to such issues, five feminist scholars associated with the University of Tennessee Knoxville discussed the need for better data about the prevalence, diversity, and severity of negative experiences at our professional social work conferences. We patterned our investigation on prior research in harassment and discrimination at conferences in anthropology (Winking et al, 2019), dental research (Heaton et al, 2020), geography (American Association of Geographers, 2020), political science (Sapiro & Campbell, 2018), psychology-law (Gottfried, 2020), and sciences, engineering, and medicine (National Academies of Science Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2018).

Methods: The research team undertook a rapid assessment approach to the study, informed by the various roles team members hold across different subject positions (e.g., race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, career stage, relationship to national social work organizations, etc.) to critically engage with an investigation of conference attendee experiences. The survey included eight demographic questions, multiple categorical and Likert scale questions, and one open-ended question. Following IRB approval, the research team launched an anonymous online survey. The call for participants was distributed at social work academic conferences and through national social work organization mailing lists and social work academic listservs between September 2023 and January 2024, with a final sample of 290. Qualitative data from the open-ended questions were coded (using NVivo and MS word using emic and etic coding) by two researchers, and then codes and themes were reviewed and discussed with an additional member of the team. Quantitative data were downloaded and, after data cleaning, were analyzed in SPSS v.29 using descriptive and bivariate statistics. We conducted a third critical analysis of our rapid assessment approach to this responsive research project, assessing the choice of methods, the integration of existing literature with formal and informal knowledge as insiders, and the practical implications of the study for social work academic organizations, universities, and individuals.

Papers: This symposium includes three papers from this study, each offering a distinct analysis. The first paper describes a qualitative analysis of the experiences of harassment and discrimination at social work conferences, offering insights into the kinds of discrimination and harassment experienced, the structures and culture that support these behaviors, and the ways targets of these negative experiences responded. The second paper uses descriptive and bivariate statistics to explore respondent beliefs about reporting these negative experiences, identifying perceived barriers and the impact of respondent identities on decision to report. The final paper is a reflexive analysis of the use of rapid assessment as an approach to examine socially disruptive events. We will also incorporate recommendations for academic organizations, social work programs, and individual academics to improve conference attendee experiences at social work conferences.