Service users’ complaints concerning social workers’ professional functioning: Arabs in Israel as a case study

Abstract

Sparse professional literature on complaints against social workers, focuses on a few specific variables, discussing them from a universal/contextless viewpoint. This study considers such complaints as a holistic (integrative) issue which should be studied within particular contexts. The research traced service users’ complaints against social workers, investigating social workers’ conceptions concerning the extent and type of complaints, and the social workers’ coping mechanisms. A phenomenological approach elicited data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 16 social workers from Arab welfare bureaus in Israel. Findings indicated that formal complaints are rare despite many grievances (tazamur) concerning the service. There are almost no complaints concerning serious offences, because in addition to formal punishment, community cultural punishments are severe. Complaints can be lodged in eight regulatory bodies, inside or outside the bureau, distinguished as either educational or disciplinary in policy. Coping strategies (expressing internal or external loci of control) depend on the complaint type (against the system or against the social workers’ professional functioning and/or ethical behaviour) and the regulatory body’s character. A professional-ethical complaint is a context-informed pragmatic challenge that social workers should understand and be trained to consider as an opportunity for professional development.

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 — 6 citations exist upstream.

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