Social work students often face personal and institutional challenges prior to, during, and after international field placements. If not managed, these challenges may compromise students' professional development and hinder their meaningful contribution to placements abroad. The latter is of particular concern when students from the Global North are placed in the Global South, where uncontested ethnocentrism may exacerbate post-colonial power dynamics. In this article, we evaluate current social work literature on international field placements and set forth challenges that students commonly encounter. We review 24 previous studies, from which four personal and five institutional challenges are identified and assessed. We then recommend five actions through which these challenges might be managed and suggest implications for schools of social work.

International service learning (ISL) programs seek to facilitate community inclusion, but such participation can prove elusive. For technical projects, such ventures can undermine local leadership, generate mistrust in communities, and even create an aversion to technological solutions. In this article, we document how social work and engineering students collaborated to bring clean water to rural Guatemala, and demonstrate how we employed social work principles to address the myriad issues encountered in the project. We contend that the inclusion of a social work perspective, with its emphasis on relationships, can help mitigate some of the challenges ISL projects tend to encounter.

This study focused on how acculturative stress and psychological distress affect Puerto Rican-born women residing in the United States. Mediation path analysis was used to estimate relationships between contextual factors, acculturative stress, and psychological distress. The fit of the data to the final model was adequate as estimated using chi-square analysis, comparative fit index, Tucker-Lewis Index, and root-mean-square error of approximation. Racial discrimination (b = 0.38, p = .01), difficulties visiting family abroad (b = 0.26, p = .03), and age at immigration (b = 0.19, p = .03) were positively associated with acculturative stress. The factor English skills (b = -0.31, p = .02) was negatively associated with acculturative stress. Racial discrimination had the strongest effect on acculturative stress, followed by English skills, difficulties visiting family abroad, and age at immigration. Racial discrimination (b = 0.39, p = .01) and financial constraints (b = 0.30, p = .01) were positively associated with psychological distress. Racial discrimination affected the women's psychological distress the most, followed by economic contexts (financial constraints). This study informs practitioners in considering the significant contextual factors relevant to the psychological distress of Puerto Rican-born women.

Abstract Point-of-use water filters are a means to provide clean water vital to the health of people in developing countries. The factors that influence the adoption of this technology include hygiene knowledge, health beliefs related to the use of new technology, and technical issues with using the filter (e.g., water taste and breakage). This study examines how people in Mayan communities in rural Guatemala perceived biosand filters they had received and what factors related to their filter use. Based on the survey and interviewer observations, approximately 53% were regular filter users, 28% were irregular filter users, and 19.4% were non-filter users. The observational data revealed that actual filter use is lower than self-reported use, reflecting complexities in the adoption of technology. One such complexity can be seen in the connection between health beliefs and behavior. The belief that believing drinking filtered water is salubrious does not necessarily coincide with filter use, but education and hygienic practices correlated with regular filter use. Furthermore, regular users typically depend on family members for a daily reminder to use the filter, suggesting that education should foster peer support as well as imparting knowledge.

Each year, 1.1 billion people suffer from disease, dehydration, and malnutrition fueled by waterborne pathogens. Although point-of-use water filters are a viable solution, effectiveness requires consistent use. As collaborators in international development projects, social workers are poised to address service barriers through their focus on multilevel practice and a relentless emphasis on culturally competent practice. This article describes an illustrative case of a water remediation project in rural Guatemala where social work researchers collaborated with engineers to understand how users appraised the project. We present a content analysis of interviews conducted in 20 households in the Boca Costa and Highland regions of rural Guatemala that received bio-sand water filters, which revealed a diverse group of filter users, with varying motivations and constancy patterns. Our study demonstrates how talking to people is essential to understanding their use of technology and how other objective measures—such as the wetness of the sand—can be helpful in interpreting results. It also shows that within the developing context, people vary in their need for additional supports as they adopt new health-promoting activities.