The social work profession was revived in Romania in 1994, when the first generation of university graduates went to the field. However, only in 2011, when the Law no. 292 of Social Work was issued, the framework for the activity of social workers in the rural communities was settled. Although the legislation provided a proper context for the unfolding of a meaningful social work in rural settings, the labor market was far from being able to absorb the great number of needed professionals. On the one hand, the paper intends to present the barriers that marked the beginning of social work in the Romanian rural space. On the other hand, the paper briefly describes the particularities and the opportunities for social work in the rural areas. Also, through the voice of professionals, the main social problems in the countryside are exposed and some possible interventions aiming at the improvement of the life conditions among the villagers are proposed. The study is based on 43 qualitative interviews carried out in 2016-2020 with professionals employed as social services workers by commune or village local councils. The collected data were explored and interpreted using thematic analysis. One conclusion is that the field is dynamic and in need of substantial improvement.
During the last three decades, thousands of highly qualified social workers who graduated from Romanian universities were employed in the public systems of social work of the European Union. Social group work is studied as a compulsory discipline for undergraduate students. The major focus of our study was the effectiveness of the learning of Social Work Methods with Groups (SWMG) of students, using workshops in a full-time undergraduate program from Romania. We were interested in finding out the perceptions of students about their learning processes and outcomes in the context of teaching the same discipline exclusively in the online medium, due to the pandemic, and in the face-to-face environment via traditional classroom instruction. This study had a mainly quantitative design, covering two academic years between 2018 and 2020 for the two cohorts of social work students. The core analysis was focused on the activities of students at the SWMG laboratories: 50 students in 2020 and 92 students in 2019. Descriptive, inferential statistics and thematic content analysis were applied to two types of deliverables of students: the self-assessment sheet and the group plan. The results of our study showed that training of cognitive and self-awareness skills prevailed among the students who learned online in 2020, while the acquisition of interpersonal skills was reported at a significantly higher level by students who learned in the face-to-face medium in 2019. The students in the traditional classrooms favoured the training of other professional skills, too, like problem-solving skills. However, students who studied exclusively online attributed a significantly greater overall usefulness of SWMG workshops for professional practise than their peers who participated in the face-to-face laboratories. A remarkable result was that more therapeutic and support groups were preferred in the online environment, maybe related to the concerns generated by the pandemic. Remote education forced most students to return to their original places of residence, mostly in the countryside and brought negative psychological effects caused by social isolation due to the pandemic. Remote learning is not the most desirable educational option. Students gain most from blended teaching-learning vehicles: face-to-face and online medium.
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