Highlights• Latino day laborers are vulnerable to crime victimization in new immigrant settlement cities.• Victimization led to sociocultural alienation, despair or desesperaci on, and problem drinking.• Findings highlight the intersection of structural vulnerability, violence, and mental health.
Summary: Social work field instructors are integral to social work education and must balance professional responsibilities with supervising students. Empowerment and burnout are concepts that may impact the well-being of social work field instructors. However, few studies have explored empowerment and burnout among this population. This study aimed to a) explore the association between overall empowerment and burnout and b) explore how different elements of empowerment are associated with burnout when controlling for interprofessional work, demographic characteristics, and workplace characteristics. This nonexperimental cross-sectional study utilized primary survey data to examine the association between the Social Worker Empowerment Scale and ProQOL Burnout scores among a sample of social work field instructors (N = 189) of a Mid-Atlantic university. Findings: Preliminary bivariate analysis found a significant negative association between overall empowerment and burnout. Hierarchical linear regression results displayed a significant negative association between burnout and two elements of empowerment: Collective identity and knowledge. One element of empowerment, propensity to act, was found to have a significant positive association with burnout. Years of social work experience and coping on an interprofessional team were found to have significant negative associations with burnout. Applications: Agencies and educational institutions can reduce burnout among field instructors by fostering their sense of connection to the social work profession and ensuring they feel knowledgeable and competent in their role. This can be accomplished through fostering strong relationships and providing ongoing, accessible training to field instructors. More detailed recommendations for reducing burnout by increasing empowerment are provided in the manuscript.
From the point of apprehension by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the U.S.–Mexican border to their reunification with sponsors in U.S. communities, unaccompanied children (UC) face political, social, and economic conditions, heightening their risk for mental and physical health burdens that may be exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such risk underscores the importance of social work practice and advocacy for the improved treatment and experiences of UC. This article uses a structural vulnerability conceptual lens to summarize the existing literature regarding UC and argues that UC’s liminal immigration status, economic precarity, and lack of healthcare access place this group at high structural vulnerability during the pandemic. Further, this article identifies and describes three contexts of structural vulnerability of UC that are important points of social work intervention: (1) at the border, where migrant children are denied their legal right to seek protection; (2) in detention and shelter facilities; and (3) during reunification with sponsors. This article concludes with important practice and policy opportunities for social workers to pursue to obtain social justice for an important and highly vulnerable migrant child population.
The COVID-19 pandemic radically altered social service provision with significant public health implications as social services often target society’s most vulnerable with preventative health services addressing social determinants of health. Social service providers serve as crucial linkages to services for low-income Latinx immigrants who face substantial barriers to health and social care. However, little is known regarding how social service providers working with Latinx immigrants navigated service delivery and the rapid transition to telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. This mixed-methods (QUAL-quant; capitalization denotes primacy) study used survey data collected from April 2020 to October 2020 with Latinx immigrant serving as social service providers in the Maryland–Washington, DC, region. Social ecological theory guided the analysis of narrative data and the integration of quantitative data with qualitative themes. Participants (N = 41) were majority women (85.4%), identified as Latinx (48.6%) and elucidated themes related to their transition to telehealth, including adjusting from in-person to telehealth, barriers to telehealth implementation, impact on quality of services, working to prevent clients’ disconnection to social services, and work-related stress and satisfaction. Through the firsthand experiences of frontline social service providers, results reveal conditions of scarcity endemic in social services for Latinx immigrants that preexisted the pandemic and became further constrained during a time of heightened health and social need. Further, critical insights regarding the use of remote modalities with vulnerable populations (language minorities and immigrants) can be instructive in the development of improved and accessible telehealth and remote programming and services for Latinx immigrants.
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