The Effect of Work Experience on the Self-Concept and Anxiety Level of the Social Work Graduate Student

Abstract

It has been assumed by some leading social work educators that students in professional training display unproductive or even counter-productive anxiety in field-learning situations. It has been further suggested that this excess anxiety has led to a certain amount of threat to the ego which could result in problems in work performance. This paper tells of an investigation into the impact of previous work experience on the manifest anxiety level and self-concept of a set of graduate social work students in a mid-western university in the United States. Data were gathered using widely used tests, the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Tennessee Self Concept Scale. Contrary to the hypothesis, prior work experience did not act as an inhibitor of anxiety nor as a support to self-concept. No significant difference on test scores was found between those students with work experience and those with no work experience. The writer is unable to satisfyingly account for the lack of significance in these findings. An unexpected by-product of this research was the finding that manifest anxiety levels and self-concept scores of social work graduate students in either category were not different from those found in other occupational populations. This suggests, tentatively of course, that social work students may not have higher anxiety levels as some of the literature has led us to expect. It may be the anxiety that social work educators see in students in the field is quite within normal limits, that it does not threaten students' self-concepts, and that it does not inhibit learning

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