Vol. 11 No. 1 (2013): Student Attitudes in Social Work

New Issue! Special Issue on Student Attitudes in Social Work

Welfare States are under transformation, in Europe as well as in other parts of the world. Probably this is as true as never before since 2008 and 2009, the years of the so called financial crisis have started. Therefore social work and social policy have been fundamentally changed as parts or even as a correspondent to welfare regimes and also as a public service. But social work is not only re-acting in the radically transformed political arena, but acting actively as an agent of the current transformation of former welfare states as well.

On this background the question of attitudes, of values and motivations, of those who are the daily agents of social work, are of high interest. Especially the ethical, political and professional perspectives of those, who will be the agents of social work practice and research in future, should be focused: Will there be a change in the student’s perspectives as an expression of the transformation? How strong can be a professional habitus of social work students – relatively independent of policy changes or not?

These questions are so far underresearched. Student attitudes have been focused by individual authors in the last years already, but there are results missing in regard to the transformation of welfare states and social policy in general.

Hence Social Work & Society is very pleased to contribute to an international debate on those questions of student attitudes by publishing two groundbreaking papers, presenting first research insights from Italy and Germany: Annamaria Campanini and Carla Facchini can show the results of a nationwide survey with almost 2000 Italian BA students and Bernd Dollinger, Nina Oelkers and Holger Ziegler present a first considerations on the basis of a three-parted survey, based on a survey in three main academic courses of social work education in Germany, where around 600 students have been questioned.

Beside the SW&S.Special Issue on attitudes of social work students, the current issue includes a number of highly relevant papers: Michael B. Katz on Biological Inferiority of the Undeserving Poor; Bjørn Øystein on Children and Explorations of Self-Perception in the context of foster care; Sigrid Schilling, Joel Gautschi, Cornelia Rüegger, Olga Kurenkova and Gregori Shcherbakov on International Cooperation in Social Work and not at least Mavis Dako-Gyeke and Emmanuel Sowah Asumang on Stigmatization and Discrimination Experiences of Persons with Mental Illness. But the current SW&S.Issue also includes a very interesting essay on Active Local Information and Communication Strategy within the Context of the European Migration Policy by Anja Van den Durpel and more very helpful reflections on the transformation of the welfare state by Marlene Walk in her research paper.

A current information to the SW&S.readers:

After SW&S have been funded as a member of the Digital Peer Publishing Initiative (DIPP) and by the German Research Association (DFG) in the last years and till the beginning of 2013, SW&S has to develop a new institutional basis. This process is still under development, but after first steps have been done in the last months decisions will be made at the beginning of 2014. We will inform all our readers as soon as possible. If there was a lack in response in the last months from the SW&S.Co-Ordinating Office, we do have to apologize. But the current situation is a result of our institutional changes and the challenges in a self-organized context of an Open Access Journal like SW&S is one.

However: We are looking forward to our 11^th year in 2014 – even there is enough to worry about. But we will continue to act as a journal interested in a critical and political perspective on social work and social policy research.

Thanks a lot for your interest and enjoy the current and all future SW&S.Issues!

The SW&S.Co-Ordinating Office