Spirituality in social work practice: Myth or essential component of ethical and effective service provision?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Recent scholarship questions the concept of practitioners addressing spirituality in social work practice arguing, for instance, that social workers should not conduct spiritual assessments. This article responds to these criticisms. Employing a modified domain-based review of the relevant literature, this article contends that addressing spirituality is an essential component of ethical and effective service provision. Findings To support the notion that social workers should address spirituality in practice, seven intertwined rationales are delineated. Specifically, conducting a spiritual assessment positions practitioners to (1) observe widely affirmed social work ethical principles, (2) respect client autonomy regarding the nature of the services they receive, (3) identify potential strengths that can be leveraged to assist clients deal with challenges, (4) provide culturally relevant services that resonate, rather than conflict, with clients' values, (5) create evidence-informed spiritual interventions that ameliorate problems, (6) advocate for social justice and clients' fundamental human rights, and (7) comply with professional standards and protocols that require the administration of spiritual assessments to optimize the effectiveness of services. Applications Based on the findings, we suggest that social workers should be equipped and trained to administer spiritual assessments and work with clients' spiritual and religious beliefs and practices to ensure the provision of effective, client-centered services.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| 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".