Nearly 500 physicians, nurses, and social workers affiliated with four general hospitals participated in a mailed questionnaire survey designed to compare interprofessional expectations of the medical social worker role in the hospital. As hypothesized, physicians and nurses expect the exclusive role of the social worker to be more limited to working with families, resolving social-environmental problems, and providing referrals than social workers expect of their role. In general, physicians and nurses do not disagree with medical social workers on what social workers expect to do in the hospital setting; rather, they disagree more on what social workers expect to be their exclusive role. Furthermore, it does not appear that other groups discredit either the biopsychosocial health care model or social worker competency. Instead, these groups perceive the special focus of the medical social worker in the hospital as enhancing the environmental support and resources of the patient, viewing the patient's family as part of that support system. These other groups may not understand or accept the person-in-environment focus of social work.

This second part of a survey report focuses on the views of physicians, nurses, and social workers concerning the role of medical social workers in addressing health-related patient problems. All three groups, but particularly physicians and nurses, were more likely to see counseling services as a social worker's job when the client was a family member of the patient, rather than the patient, and when the objective was to modify social-environmental problems of the client rather than to support or modify the person. Also, all three groups, but particularly physicians and nurses, were likely to perceive environmental problems of patients, more than emotional or behavioral ones, as an area distinctive of social work. In contrast to previous study findings, physicians and nurses did not wish to exclude social workers in hospitals from counseling patients and from addressing psychosocial problems; they just did not see these activities as distinctive of social work.

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Self-anchoring scales are ones in which each respondent provides an individual definition of the end points of a dimension and then rates himself on this self defined continuum. Presumably (1) people will rate themselves differently when asked to define anchoring points as against not defining them; and (2) people with different self-definitions of the end points of a dimension will rate themselves differently. To test these two propositions, the responses of subjects (University of Wisconsin introductory psychology students) completing different forms of a work values questionnaire were compared. One group defined anchoring points on half the items, another did no defining, and a third group was administered both forms in a testretest fashion. The results of the analysis provide no evidence that (1) people give different ratings when defining the end points of a dimension, and (2) that different definitions lead to different rankings.The conclusion, therefore, is that self-anchoring scales, compared with scales whose end points are undefined, do not demonstrably provide any special advantage to the researcher.

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