Teaching self-care: The utilization of self-care in social work practicum to prevent compassion fatigue,burnout, and vicarious trauma

ABSTRACT

Field practicum is paramount to social work pedagogy in the preparation of emerging direct practice professionals. Field students integrate foundational knowledge as they implement practice skills learned in the classroom during the social work practicum experience. Working with clients who are suffering is inevitable in direct social work practice and field practicum students can be exposed to a broad range of intense emotional experiences as they assist clients in need. Integrating self-care skills, techniques and strategies into daily social work practice becomes essential to prevent compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma. Incorporating self-care skills into the field practicum enhances opportunities for transformative student learning and helps to strengthen professional socialization during this critical educational experience. This article highlights the implementation of professional self-care instruction, use of activities and written student critical reflection assignments designed to enhance the practice experience through incorporating self-care education and strategies among undergraduate students within the field practicum seminar.     

Getting Under the Skin: Children’s Health Disparities as Embodiment of Social Class

Social class gradients in children’s health and development are ubiquitous across time and geography. The authors develop a conceptual framework relating three actions of class—material allocation, salient group identity, and inter-group conflict—to the reproduction of class-based disparities in child health. A core proposition is that the actions of class stratification create variation in children’s mesosystems and microsystems in distinct locations in the ecology of everyday life. Variation in mesosystems (e.g., health care, neighborhoods) and microsystems (e.g., family structure, housing) become manifest in a wide variety of specific experiences and environments that produce the behavioral and biological antecedents to health and disease among children. The framework is explored via a review of theoretical and empirical contributions from multiple disciplines, and high-priority areas for future research are highlighted.     

An Exploratory Study of Gambling Operators’ Use of Social Media and the Latent Messages Conveyed

Advertisements for gambling products have historically been restricted due to their potential to normalize gambling and contribute to excessive gambling behaviours among vulnerable populations. However, social media enables gambling operators to promote products and brands with fewer constraints than in traditional forms of media. This study investigated how social media is used by gambling operators to promote gambling activities including an analysis of the latent messages that are conveyed. A representative sample of major land-based and online gambling venues and operators, including casinos, clubs, hotels, lottery and wagering operators (n = 101), was obtained. Websites and social media profiles of gambling operators were audited to investigate the types of social media used, content of promotions, and prevalence of responsible gambling messaging. The results showed that Facebook and Twitter were the dominant platforms used, most commonly by casinos and online wagering operators. A key finding was that online gambling operators included gambling content in conjunction with related news and events, as well as unrelated content, as way of normalizing gambling within a broader social context. Unlike land-based gambling promotions, responsible gambling information tended not to feature in operators’ posts and profiles. The key messages propagated in social media gambling promotions were positively framed, and tended to encourage gambling using a range of cross-promotional tactics to emphasize the winning aspect of gambling. The implications of freely accessible and pervasive gambling promotions via social media are discussed with respect to the general community as well as vulnerable populations.     

Adolescents’ perceptions of parental influences on commercial and simulated gambling activities

Parents can have a major influence on young people’s access to and participation in gambling activities. However, with the rise of digital online gambling, there is greater potential for young people to freely explore and engage in gambling activities without parental oversight. This study examined perceived parental influences on adolescents’ gambling activities, including differences in these influences across commercial and simulated types of activities, and the association between parental influences and problem gambling symptoms. A survey of 824 adolescents from 3 secondary schools was conducted. The results indicated that financial gambling was usually facilitated by a parent, particularly for scratch tickets and sports betting. Simulated gambling activities, such as social casino games, tended to be reported as being unsupervised by parents. Young people’s perceptions of parents’ measures to limit, restrict or oversee online and electronic activities were not significantly associated with youth simulated gambling. Their perceptions of parental influences were not significant predictors of problem gambling behaviours. This study underscores the need to examine potential differences in how adolescents develop an understanding of different gambling activities without parental influences, and adds to the continuing debate on the necessity of regulation and other countermeasures to limit young people’s access to simulated gambling activities.     

Pubertal Timing and Adolescent Substance Initiation

We tested 3 competing hypotheses regarding the relation between pubertal timing and substance initiation in adolescence: the early timing, off-time, and stressful change hypotheses. We used longitudinal data from the Developmental Pathways Project (N = 521). Youth reported whether they had ever tried alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana at baseline, and then again at 6-, 12-, 18-, 24-, 36-, and 72-month follow-up interviews. We estimated interval censored parametric survival models and tested interactions between pubertal timing and gender and race variables. We found robust support for the early timing hypothesis, but no support for the off-time and the stressful change hypotheses.     

From Adolescent to Adult Gambling: An Analysis of Longitudinal Gambling Patterns in South Australia

Although there are many cross-sectional studies of adolescent gambling, very few longitudinal investigations have been undertaken. As a result, little is known about the individual stability of gambling behaviour and the extent to which behaviour measured during adolescence is related to adult behaviour. In this paper, we report the results of a 4-wave longitudinal investigation of gambling behaviour in a probability sample of 256 young people (50 % male, 50 % female) who were interviewed in 2005 at the age of 16–18 years and then followed through to the age of 20–21 years. The results indicated that young people showed little stability in their gambling. Relatively few reported gambling on the same individual activities consistently over time. Gambling participation rates increased rapidly as young people made the transition from adolescence to adulthood and then were generally more stable. Gambling at 15–16 years was generally not associated with gambling at age 20–21 years. These results highlight the importance of individual-level analyses when examining gambling patterns over time.     

An Analysis of the Commonality and Type of Preintervention Assessment Procedures in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (2000–2015)

We reviewed all issues of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM) from 2000 through 2015 to identify the percentage of empirical articles, which utilized some form of preintervention assessment. In addition, we categorized five types of assessment used and compared the number of assessments conducted in each category. Finally, because assessment is considered to be particularly important in the subdiscipline of behavioral safety (McSween, 2003), and prior research has not examined the commonality of assessment in this area, we also analyzed the frequency and type of assessment procedures used in behavioral safety and compared this to the use of assessment in OBM in general. Results indicated that 28% of the empirical articles in JOBM used some form of preintervention assessment. Indirect methods were the most often used type of assessment. In addition, 48% percent of the articles in JOBM, which employed a safety-related dependent variable, included some form of assessment. The most frequently used type of assessment in behavioral safety was historical assessment. Based on these data, the use of some form of preintervention assessment in OBM appears to be occurring with some regularity, and assessment in behavioral safety is more common relative to assessment in OBM in general.