Contexts of Practice and Their Impact on Social Work: A Comparative Analysis of the Context of Geography and Culture

Abstract

Social work has long struggled to adapt its knowledge base to meet the distinct needs of the communities in which it is practiced. Typically, these communities are defined culturally, ethnically, racially, geographically, or in other diverse ways. But much of this scholarship occurs in silos, and common themes across practice with otherwise diverse communities may be neglected. As a corrective, this article offers a comparative analysis of two sets of interview data collected from social workers practicing in one of two geographically and ethnically different parts of North America: the first in Canada's geographic north, and the second cohort practicing with Muslim communities in New York City's five boroughs. Comparative analysis of findings shows a surprising number of common themes, particularly in how social workers adapt theory and practice to meet the needs of their communities: identifying client needs, termination, incidental encounters, social crossovers, and “gold fish bowl” scenarios, The conclusion considers the impact on social work education, training, practice, and future research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.