Abstract
Critical perspectives and practices are fundamental to social work, yet there are only scarce examples of direct critical practice in public social services, and even fewer empirical evaluations of their outcomes for service users and social workers. This article presents a rapid evidence review of 25 evaluation studies of five programs that operate in the social services departments in Israel according to the principles of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP). The PAP is a critical paradigm for direct social work practice with people living in poverty that was implemented in the welfare services by the Ministry of Welfare, targeting over 14,000 service users. The evaluation studies we reviewed encompass an overall quantitative sample of 4612 service users and 1363 professionals, and a qualitative sample of 420 service users and 424 professionals. The findings present: (1) the program’s outcomes for service users in terms of relationship with social workers, financial circumstances, family relations, and children’s safety; and (2) the program’s impact on social workers’ attitudes and practices. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned regarding social workers’ role in combatting poverty, the construction of success in interventions with people in poverty, and the article’s limitations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 889 |
| Journal | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 3 Jan 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023 by the authors.
Funding
This review has a few limitations. First, the second-wave interventions of the PAP programs in this review reached their completion during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had substantial effects on social services, social workers, service users, and society at large. As a result, the evaluation studies that addressed the operation and outcomes of these programs during this period were likely affected by the pandemic, and thus their findings should be examined with this point in mind. Second, 15 of the 25 studies in the sample used for this review were written by this article’s authors. Moreover, all three authors have been highly involved in the development, conceptualization, and research of the PAP. This involvement could bias our reading and interpretations of the reviews. Nonetheless, all eight evaluation studies initiated by the Ministry of Welfare [,,,,,,,] were external and conducted by independent researchers. Although these external studies were funded by the Welfare Ministry as part of the pilot phase of the programs, they were operated by well-known researchers and agencies, firmly bracketed from the ministry itself. Thus, in this review, we attempted to base our findings on these studies, using our own studies to support and enrich the results of these external evaluations. Furthermore, most of our own studies were conducted with other researchers, who assisted us in bracketing our involvement with the PAP. Third, this review combines quantitative and qualitative research, with more qualitative studies than quantitative ones, complicating the review’s comparability. This sample represents the character of the evaluation and research on social work psychosocial intervention conducted in Israel. To deal with this combination of research methods, we used the qualitative studies to enrich the picture presented by the quantitative ones. Fourth, although the PAP aims to address poverty in both macro and micro practices, this review highlights the micro practice in the PAP programs. This may attest to the direct outcomes which are the focus of the evaluation studies. Furthermore, it can be argued that the adoption and implementation of the PAP by the Welfare Ministry in Israel represents a macro change in working with people living in poverty [,]. We believe that this review presents viable findings regarding the operation of the PAP in social services in Israel and provides rich insights into the meanings of critical social work practice and the opportunities it offers. To proceed with these findings, future research should focus on identifying mechanisms or procedures needed to maintain the PAP model’s sustainability over time.
Keywords
- Poverty-Aware Paradigm
- critical practice
- evaluation
- review
- social services departments
