Development of a Social Work Skills Self-Efficacy Scale for Field Education

Anne E. Fortune
School of Social Welfare
University at Albany
135 Western Avenue
Albany NY 12222
518 442-5322
FAX: 518 442-5380
lbkaye@earthlink.net
 
Lara B. Kaye
School of Social Welfare
University at Albany
135 Western Avenue
Albany NY 12222
518 4633-4685
FAX: 518 442-5380
lbkaye@earthlink.net
 
Gary Holden
Ehrenkranz School of Social Work
New York University
One Washington Square North, Room 407
New York, NY 10003
212 998 5940
gary.holden@nyu.edu
 
Alonzo Cavazos
Department of Social Work
University of Texas-Pan American
1201 West University Drive
Edinburg TX 78539-2999
956-381-2487
alonso@panam.edu
Purpose:  Because a problem in evaluating field education is a inadequate measures of student outcome, we sought to develop a measure of student self-efficacy that could be used across settings and programs.
 
Methods:  The Social Work Skills Self-Efficacy Scale (SWSSES) was developed according to Bandura’s (1997) guidelines for the construction of self-efficacy scales.  It asks students about their confidence in their ability to perform 43 tasks in seven categories drawn from a review tasks performed by social workers.
 
The SWSSES was given to 103 graduate students at one MSW program and 25 social work majors at two undergraduate programs.  All students were just completing their field practicum.  Field instructors rated each student’s performance on skills, and the students also completed a self-rating of skill in the same areas.
 
Findings:  The SWSSES had reasonable internal consistency with Cronbach’s alphas for the 7 categories between .78 and .97.  For criterion validity, the SWSSES was not significantly correlated to the field instructors’ ratings of performance (r=-.13, p=.35).  However, students’ ratings of their own skill were significantly correlated with their overall self-efficacy (r=.57, p<.0001).

Implications:  The SWSSES is promising as a measure of student self-assessment.  Its positive correlation with a self-rating of skills on a measure intended for one specific program suggests it may be used to compare students from programs that use different field criteria.  However, because it was not related to field instructors’ ratings of students, further research is needed to determine if it correlates with external evaluations of student performance or should be used only as an ancillary measure of outcome.  A key issue for discussion is the question: how do we proceed with the development of social work outcome measures when there is no commonly accepted ‘gold standard’ measure?

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