Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Social work in rural contexts presents some additional challenges with regard to issues such as recruitment, retention, education and training that if not tackled can exacerbate the service disadvantages apparent in many rural settlements. This chapter begins by reviewing what is known about rural social workers and the work they do, and discusses why they choose rural practice and how they adjust to it, job stress and staff retention issues. It then turns to the issue of professional education and preparation for rural practice. It concludes with recommendations for employers, educators, the profession, communities and practitioners concerning how to attract the right staff and prepare and support them so that once they come into rural areas, they remain in practice. We continue to use the term ‘social worker’ broadly, to encompass both qualified and unqualified social workers, and other social care and welfare workers. Rural social workers and their work Unfortunately, there are no national studies published that provide general profiles of the rural social work and social care workforce, and certainly no comprehensive data for international comparisons. Thus, the evidence base is patchy. with most of the available information coming from comparatively small surveys in Australia, Canada and the US, typically involving samples of between 50 and 350 respondents. This discussion draws primarily from a comparative study involving rural social workers in Australia and the US (Saltman et al, 2004), and three Australian studies (Lonne and Cheers, 1999, 2000; Munn, 2002), and a comparison of burnout and job satisfaction among rural and urban workers (Dollard et al, 1999). Demographic profile Around 75–80% of the respondents in these studies were women and each sample had an average age of between 35 and 40 years. In Lonne's (2002) sample, around 37% of the respondents were between 21 and 29 years, another 35% were between 30 and 39 years, and 24% were between 40 and 49 years of age. Generally, these studies report an experienced workforce with 75% of the US and 47% of the Australian samples in Saltman et al's study (2004), and 41% of Munn's (2002) sample, having 10 years’ or more social work experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.374 | 0.187 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".