The Price of Placement (Part 2): Basic Needs and Well-Being of U.S. Social Work Students in Field Practicums
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The financial and basic needs insecurities of students undertaking field practicums are pervasive yet understudied issues within social work education. In part 1 of this manuscript, an international review of empirical literature found that traditional unpaid placements exacerbate economic inequities, creating barriers to degree completion for underserved student groups. To date, no national studies have chronicled the financial, material, or psychological stressors that U.S. social work students experience during field practicum. To address this gap, student advocates and participatory action researchers collaboratively developed and administered a cross-sectional online survey of BSW and MSW students undertaking field placements in Spring 2023. The analysis sample (N = 635) was geographically diverse, with individuals residing in 40 states across the country. Comparatively more respondents lost weight due to food insecurity (15.4%) than received payment for their practicum labor (12.8%). More than half of respondents reported experiencing housing insecurity (56.8%) and/or clinically significant depression symptoms (56.2%). One quarter reported that their field placement organizations had unfair personnel practices or that they were expected to work beyond scheduled placement hours. Students from underserved backgrounds reported disproportionate financial hardships. Findings indicate that the current U.S. field education curriculum is not attuned to contemporary students’ needs or circumstances.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".