Objective: Social workers are at high risk of experiencing secondary traumatic stress (STS). We recommend inclusion of social entrepreneurship in social work education, including the development of critical thinking, commitment to change, and identification of opportunities. Conclusions: Successful social entrepreneurship in social work depends on competencies, skills, and motives to seek out social change as well as the ability of social workers to identify and seize opportunities in their sociopolitical environment within a specific time frame. However, these personal characteristics are insufficient in the absence of sociopolitical opportunities, including (a) changes in policymakers’ perceptions regarding ways to deal with social problems, (b) changes among political policy actors or appointment of new key decision-makers, and (c) formative events in the relevant environment. Social workers need to have competencies, skills, and motives to seek out social change. Results: Interaction between the individual and their ability to seize changes in their sociopolitical environment promotes social entrepreneurship.
Method: We conducted in-depth semistructured interviews with 18 social workers in Israel who successfully established social services to tackle social problems in innovative, creative ways. We sought to understand what makes social work entrepreneurs innovative and successful. Objective: Due to the increasing complexity of social problems, social workers need to adopt an innovation and entrepreneurship lens to create innovative long-term solutions for diverse and vulnerable populations. The discipline should more actively promote its scientific status to the public. Conclusions: Many Americans do not recognize the science behind social work. Large differences emerged in how respondents rated the capacity of science to address social work’s grand challenges. Results: Although only a slim majority of respondents agreed that social work is a science, a solid majority (over 80%) believed science can be used to solve social problems.
Respondents were administered a survey and asked about their perceptions of science and social work. Method: We used a crowdsourcing platform to gather data from a diverse sample of the U.S. This study examines how the general public perceives the relationship between science and social work, their perceptions of how social science may be used to resolve social problems, the extent to which science could address social work’s grand challenges, and the public’s confidence in social work research. Objective: Although social work has a long history of emphasizing its scientific foundations, the discipline has been unclear about how the public evaluates social work’s scientific standing.
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