Spiritual Competence: What It Is,Why It Is Necessary,and How to Develop It

Various professional standards underscore the importance of providing effective services to all people, including those from diverse religious backgrounds. Yet despite these standards, studies have repeatedly found that most social workers receive little training in navigating this aspect of diversity during their graduate educations. To address this lack of training, the present article discusses a concept that is foundational for effective service provision with spiritual clients from diverse religious backgrounds—spiritual competence. More specifically, this article outlines what spiritual competence is and why it is important in therapeutic work, and then offers a number of strategies for developing spiritual competence. As such, this article helps equip practitioners to provide more ethical, effective services in a nation characterized by increasing religious diversity.     

Doing It Well

SUMMARY

Social workers are being challenged internationally to be accountable by defining competency standards at beginning and advanced levels. The study that is the subject of this article will develop the work of one of the authors, which involved a 5-year longitudinal study of beginning social workers and another of experienced social workers. These studies resulted in a book on professional expertise (Fook, Ryan, & Hawkins, 2000). The present study furthered that work and subjected this theory of professional expertise to further testing by examining the work of a sample of expert (rather than experienced) social workers in the mental health field in Melbourne, Australia. Data was collected from a selected sample of mental health social workers by the use of focus group interview. This article reports on the study's findings and discusses their significance and application.     

To Whom It May Concern

Book reviewed in this article:
Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again     

Struggling to Get It Right

This article examines the challenges public and nonprofit human service funders face in the performance measurement process and the strategies they use to address these challenges. We use survey and interview data to compare funders’ experiences across a region. Common challenges included dissatisfaction with formal data collection procedures, difficulty getting providers to comply with reporting requirements, provider performance problems, and lack of capacity to use performance information. Capacity issues were a greater concern for smaller funders. Funders used a variety of strategies to address challenges. Use of some strategies depended on context. Practices were relatively consistent across funder groups.     

The Social Psychology of Corruption: Why It Does Not Exist and Why It Should

In recent decades, corruption has emerged as a major cause of global inequality and an important subject of social scientific research. This article argues that social psychologists have not taken full advantage of analytical tools at their disposal to generate explanatory accounts of corruption in non‐Western contexts. In the first part of the article, the author maintains that the lack of social psychological research on why people engage in corruption is due to the dearth of empirical data on corruption, the theoretical complexity of this phenomenon, and current popularity of neoliberalism in politics and academic research. In the second part of the article, the author argues that the symbolic interactionism school of social psychology has a number of tools that could be more helpful in exploring the causes of corruption in non‐Western settings than rational‐choice approaches that are currently en vogue. The article concludes with an argument that such analyses could generate culturally sensitive as well as policy‐relevant theories of corruption.