Best Practices for Social Workers Engaging with Spiritual/Religious Clients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examined what Canadian social workers should consider when engaging therapeutically with clients for whom spirituality/religion is of central importance. There are several challenges in examining this issue in Canada (the north section of Turtle Island). One is the oppression of Indigenous peoples’ spirituality by colonizers imposing various Christian denominational spiritual/religious views. There has also been a trend of Christian practice declining in church worship among settler people, although Christianity remains part of the dominant cultural norms. Like many of the helping professions, social work has little to no education/training related to spirituality/religion and clinical work. This move away in the helping professions from inclusion of spirituality/religion is increasingly complicated by the growing body of research that identifies the possible positive impacts of spirituality/religion on clients. Also worthy of note are some of the cultures of people in Canada who include a variety of spiritual/religious expressions as central to their community identities. Their multiple identities can also comprise of race, place of origin, and spiritual/religious expressions other than Christian, resulting in various forms of oppression.\nIn response to the above noted issues critical theory was employed throughout my research, considering the continuum of experiences, negative through to positive, spirituality/religion can have on people. These varied impacts were considered from both personal and systemic perspectives, which is a central principle of social work often identified as person in environment. The constructivist grounded theory methodology used in this investigation informed the ongoing consideration of the research findings and along with the literature. This qualitative method was employed in the interviews with ten therapists who include spirituality/religion in their therapy practices. The themes from the research participants’ responses along with literature reviewed informed the practice principles identified in this paper. The overall findings suggest that best practice in social work interventions includes spirituality/religion. Informed by critical theory analysis, what emerged from the research were ten interrelated social work principles that promote both social work therapeutic practice and social justice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.024 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".