Attitudes and Behaviors of Social Work Students Toward Lesbian and Gay Male Clients

Abstract

Since the requirement of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) to integrate theoretical and practice content about the oppression of gay and lesbian persons into the curriculum, few studies have assessed the effectiveness of various methods of incorporating the content. This paper reports the results of a study examining the effects of a panel presentation on social work students' attitudes, their anticipated professional practice, and the relationship between their attitudes and anticipated professional behavior. It also compares the results from the panel presentation with the results from other intervention methods. Results indicated that the panel presentation had little influence on the attitudes or anticipated professional behavior of students. Intervention methods integrated into the classroom setting influenced the attitudes and anticipated professional behavior of students significantly more than the panel presentation. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678.

Attitudes Toward Gay Men and Lesbian Women Among Heterosexual Social Work Faculty

“…Similar to national population studies (Battle & Lemelle, 2002;Herek & Capitanio, 1999;Vincent, Peterson & Parrot, 2009;Rowatt et al, 2009), studies conducted with social work students have produced mixed results concerning race (Black, Oles, Cramer, & Bennett, 1999;Black, Oles, & Moore, 1998;Cluse-Tolar et al, 2004;Logie et al, 2007;Newman et al, 2002;Sun, 2002). Among social work practitioners, race did not significantly predict sexual prejudice (Crisp, 2007), yet faculty of color have been found to report significantly less accepting attitudes compared to White faculty (Einbinder et al, 2012;Woodford et al, 2012a).…”

Are you ready? Qualifying social work students’ perception of their preparedness to work competently with service users from sexual and gender minority communities

“…There is much evidence that attitudes towards LGB people are greatly affected by proximity and acquaintance (Berkman & Zinberg, 1997;Black et al, 1999). For example, contact with lesbians and gay men, both socially and as service users, has been found to correlate with lower levels of homophobia (Weiner, 1989cited in Black et al, 1999, and having lesbian or gay acquaintances, friends or family members has been found to be related to lower levels of homophobia and higher standards of anticipated professional behaviour amongst social work students (Cramer, Oles & Black, 1997).…”

“…Immediate informal student feedback was very positive, with many people commenting that this was the first trans person they had knowingly met. Research (Black et al, 1999) conducted around LGB service users suggests that the impact of a one-off event such as this may be limited, and that ongoing content on minority issues across the curriculum may be more effective. It would be interesting to conduct further research into the impact this session had on students' levels of perceived preparedness to work effectively with trans people, but this is beyond the scope of this study.…”

The State of the Social Work Profession: A Systematic Review of the Literature on Antigay Bias

“…Six studies focused on changing students' attitudes through participation in a pedagogical intervention or social work course work (Bassett & Day 2003;Black, Oles, Cramer, & Bennett, 1999;Black, Oles, & Moore, 1996;Cramer, 1997;Cramer, Oles, & Black, 1997;Dongvillo & Ligon, 2001).…”