Research concepts and applications

Social Work Children

A research question that will be raised and answered in the research proposal will be how to reduce information technology (it) anxiety among social workers in child welfare settings and how to make them more willing to employ it. The method for attacking this issue will be to make a comparison with online education and distance learning. Many of the same issues with regard to the lack of face-to-face contact and human interaction exist in online education and many of the same adaptive strategies are applicable to better employing it in the social work arena. As in online education, the client who is better suited for face-to-face interaction needs to be routed in that direction and those who deal better with remote technology need to be routed in that direction. If the social worker sees a successful integration of it, they will then be more likely to use it across the board. Hopefully, since children are involved, this implementation of technology will go more smoothly than feared by the adult social worker.

Research Methods

Design Issues

As in online education, efficacy and computer anxiety were all determinants in designing the system and arriving at decisions about how to mitigate problems dealing with stakeholder usage. In social work in a childrens' services setting. There are often barriers that impede service, accuracy and efficiency. Information technology can provide solutions that can help remove barriers that social work agencies and professionals face in the areas of planning, funding, and empowerment in case management, social work and other areas of human services (Saade & Kira, 2009, 177-178). Variables for social work services starts with the establishment an it infrastructure that will support the day-to-day activities that are vital social services and to service delivery. Limited funds may affect this ability to purchase vital technology that will enhance service delivery and remove barriers that cause inefficiencies. Funding is a barrier most often faced in social services because there are limited funds to go around and the government has only x amount of dollars in the budget to allocate to the social work field period. Today's case workers and human services workers are tasked with the collection of large volumes of detail information about clients activities and findings, monitoring progress, accessing data for eligibility for supported programs and ensuring clients are getting services that they are entitled to. Typically, case workers collected information via paper and pen during client's visits. Although paper base data collection has remained a constant, it has advanced in social service agencies by the provision of aggregated and historical views of client data electronically in order to best serve each client, rather than individual physical file storage.

As noted earlier variables that are associated with the level of confidence in using technology in state child welfare include older social workers over 35 years of age who are uncomfortable with paper (even paper notes and using clipboards or notebooks). In the literature review, it was demonstrated that computer anxiety levels correlated highly with the level of it training that was provided to the social work caseworker. The researchers concluded that those who spent more time on the computer each week and received more training were more likely to have lower computer anxiety levels. It was suggested by Choi, et al., (2002), that the CAIN could be used in social work settings as a positive tool in identifying workers in need of more training.

The perceptions of many social workers is that it compromises accountability to their clients because of a lack of face-to-face interaction or a personal touch. Caseworkers feel that their clients become alienated from the services offered in therapy and that it services such as e-therapy do nothing to decrease this alienation. In this case there is conceptual anxiety on behalf of the social worker. One would have to find out what the differences are between those clients who are under and who are over 35. However, perhaps they have not considered all technologies such as video conferencing which might greatly enhance the quality of a virtual experience between the social worker and a client online. After all, television attracts people to watch it and perhaps this could provide an interface to get the client and the social caseworker to interact more effectively with each other.

Many caseworkers perceive that the new information technology compromises their ability to offer services at all or in the quality of the services because it has greatly increased their caseloads, therefore making it impossible to deliver the services they previously could on a client by client basis. As stated above, the ability to perceive that younger clients may be getting more services may not occur to case workers over 35 and would probably to those who are under that age. This is especially the case when the it system goes down and then they can not deliver services via paper or have to reschedule a visit. This just further clogs the caseworker's overworked schedule. Additionally, there would be a question of how it would affect the documentation of client information in an evidence-based environment, especially when one is documenting client issues for pending court dates or court-appointed actions.

Supervisors generally perceive that the use of technology increases accountability of the social workers to deliver services for every precious dollar allocated. This is based on the sheer amount of data that is being processed and that is available at one to three keystrokes or the movement of a mouse. Theoretically, this should improve the performance of an evidence-based practice. However, if the client is lost in the melange, it is easy to sympathize with the caseworker's worries.

Supervisors perceive that it helps the social worker to provide more services to the clients. They are generally not taking into account the increased work loads and conceptual anxiety exhibited on the part of the social workers and their clients. This ability to deliver impacts directly upon accountability and as pointed above, this delivery may depend on the exposure to and familiarity with it. The supervisors perceive that it increases their subordinates discipline and makes them able to do more with less.

Survey Methodology

The social work methodology for this research proposal will be similar to that used in studies in online education as evidenced in online and remote learning environments. Even more importantly, it looks at the teacher student communication as a two-way street via the medium of information technology. Anxiety level is the most important factor and will be a central focus of the study as it was in the Saade and Kira. They broke their anxiety component down into trait anxiety (general pervasive anxiety over the range of the experience), state anxiety (fluctuates over time in relation to responsive situations) and concept-specific anxiety (transitory type of anxiety that follows the between trait and state) (ibid., 179).