Abstract
Histories of social work and the social clinic face a number of barriers to fulfill the most basic tasks of description. Little can be surmised about the extent of operations, the details of service, the number served and most important the effects of the services on recipients or more broadly on the culture itself. Even the more recent program evaluations, and notably those that attempted to address outcomes are themselves tortuously biased. Their methods, data, and conclusions can be untwisted to provide a general estimate of outcomes that usually reduce their modest claims to levels of ineffectiveness. All that is left is the field’s beleaguered adherence to popular values—a pantomime of ineffective talking cures in denial of the material claims of those in need.
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Notes
- 1.
Part of the problem of accurately describing the field concerns the various definitions employed by different sources of what constitutes a social worker. In its 2016 survey of occupations, the US Department of Labor counted about 631,000 self-identified social workers of whom only about two-thirds have any degree in the field; however, it provided little data that described practice (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/community-and-social-service/social-workers.htm#tab-6). A survey commissioned by the National Association of Social Workers and replicated a few years later are the most comprehensive and credible sources of information about social workers and social work practice but still inadequate. They only surveyed social workers licensed by various state boards (NASW Center for Workforce Studies 2010). The 2006 survey reported that licensed social workers only comprise about 50% of all social workers with social work degrees (ibid., p. 6) although they are apparently among the most educated in the field. The survey only achieved a response rate of 45%. Mental health was by far the most commonly reported primary area of practice containing 37% of respondents while social workers in many other areas of practice apparently employed a variety of clinical interventions (e.g., child welfare, addictions, school social work, and others). Average annual salaries were $37,650. The 2008–2009 replication of the survey largely repeated its findings although it with a response rate below 40%. The shortcomings of both surveys undercut their value. They addressed only a small portion of the field and achieved low response rates. They relied on respondent perceptions but failed to test the accuracy of the responses. The tasks and areas of practice the reports were poorly described. Salary data conflated full-time and part-time workers. As a result, basic knowledge of social workers and social work activities—the distribution of social workers across areas of practice and their activities through the years—is speculative at best.
- 2.
The reality of the orphan trains program is difficult to assess accurately. There is no systematic accounting of the children’s situations nor of their outcomes. Most of the information is anecdotal. The historical reconstructions are dependent on the partial records of agencies such as the New York Children’s Aid Society and interviews conducted with the few remaining and available orphan train children. Those interviews are unlikely to adequately represent children who experienced abusive placements, runaways, and others who did not settle into lives easily accessible to interviewers or who died as a result of their placements.
- 3.
I was enrolled in Roy Lubove’s history of social work course in 1966 and stayed in touch with him and a number of his colleagues until the late 1980s. His political views became even more strident than those of the neoconservatives whom he supported. He also had a judgment of academic social workers in particular as uninformed, unintelligent and closed to objective argumentation. I do not disagree with this judgment that still seems largely accurate. He was in many ways a man of his beloved nineteenth century, born too late to participate in and too early to appreciate the nation’s reenactment of it in the 1996 welfare reforms.
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Epstein, W.M. (2019). Precursors to Modern Social Work. In: Psychotherapy and the Social Clinic in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32750-7_6
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