Graduation Semester and Year
2023
Language
English
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Social Work
Department
Social Work
First Advisor
Diane Mitschke
Abstract
Social workers will encounter grief, death, and dying in their professional careers. Whether or not it is integral to the practice setting, it is integral to life, and clients in all settings will be impacted by grief and death. Rapidly increasing research in this area has uncovered grief and death as an important competency that new social workers are lacking (Pomeroy et al., 2019). This shortfall impacts social workers through increased risk of vicarious grief and trauma, and their clients through decreased level of care provided (Richmond et al., 2021). Extricating social workers and clients from this burden is a simple solution—an increased focus on death education for social work students and practitioners. Even brief courses given to practitioners increased confidence and client outcomes (Bear & Chandran, 2019). The question that remains is whether social work students agree with new practitioners on the necessity of death education. In this study, the attitudes and interests of current social work students are examined through a multi-method exploratory study conducted at a large, public, urban, Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in the United States.
Keywords
Grief education, Death education
Disciplines
Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social Work
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Battle, Lisa, "Preparing Students for Social Work Practice with Grieving Clients" (2023). Social Work Theses. 203.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/socialwork_theses/203
Comments
Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington