Characteristics of Social Work License Examinees

Background and Purpose: Drawing on the social science literature, this study aims to contextualize the racial disparities in social work licensing exam outcomes as educational inequality stemming from cumulative lifetime (dis)advantages. This study aims to provide a brief overview of the social science literature on lifetime cumulative (dis)advantages, which helps conceptualize racial disparities in licensing exams as part of broad educational disparities. It also aims to describe the demographic, educational, and employment characteristics of the licensing examinees by race and ethnicity to determine whether those characteristics are also patterned by race and ethnicity.

Methods: It conducts descriptive analyses of the 2022 ASWB Clinical (N=25,088) and Masters (N=26,550) licensing examinees and tests three hypotheses to identify indicators of lifetime disadvantages of examinees from historically minoritized groups. To test the statistical significance of the characteristics of examinees by race and ethnicity, we used Chi-Square tests of independence and post-hoc pairwise comparisons using the Bonferroni correction to control for the Type 1 error rates.

Results: The findings, in general, supported the hypotheses that compared to White examinees, higher percentages of examinees from historically marginalized groups — except for Asians— did begin their postsecondary education with an associate degree and took significantly longer to earn their qualifying educational degrees for the ASWB exams. They also took significantly longer to take the exams for the first time and had more years of employment in non-direct service positions that may not have helped them advance their social work clinical competence. The demographic, educational, and employment characteristics indicate that examinees from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds, particularly Black examinees and a small group of examinees who did not disclose their race and ethnicity, had more indicators of cumulative educational disadvantages than their White counterparts. The findings suggest that their journeys to the profession might have been more disrupted and delayed than White examinees, even before they attempted the licensing exams for the first time. Throughout the analyses, the Black-White difference in the indicators of cumulative (dis)advantages was particularly apparent and consistent.

Conclusions and Implications: As the social work workforce is expected to become more diverse, it is crucial to recognize that many social work candidates from minority backgrounds will continue to face challenges related to cumulative socioeconomic disadvantages. This gap hinders stakeholders from fully grasping the changing characteristics of licensing examinees and the demographically disparate exam outcomes. It may be beneficial for stakeholders to design a study that collects longitudinal or retrospective measures of examinees’ lifetime (dis)advantages to understand how examinees navigated educational institutions and the social work job market to obtain their education and social work training before taking the licensing exams. Following examples from other professions, the social work profession might also consider conducting a comprehensive longitudinal study, taking a structural perspective by considering systemic factors that contribute to the disparities.