“It’s not about imposing what I believe or what I value”: Social workers’ personal reflections on religion and spirituality and their influence on practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A growing body of work has identified the impact of spirituality and religion in the life of the client and the significance it has for how social workers approach and understand their work. This study, based on qualitative interviews with social work practitioners, contributes to this literature by exploring how social workers’ beliefs impact their motivation to enter the profession, their willingness to explore spirituality and religion with clients, and the role that their own sense of spirituality or religion has in supporting or challenging them in the face of a difficult profession. We found that participants expressed a nuanced understanding of their spiritual or religious identification, offering a critically reflexive stance that demonstrated a fluidity in beliefs that for several also correlated with a willingness to initiate exploration of the significance of spirituality and religion in their clients. Our findings indicate that social workers are motivated to enter a profession that aligns with their values, and that more education and training are needed to better equip social service agencies to understand the significance of spirituality and religion, and to support social workers to engage in exploration of spirituality and religion in their work with clients.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".