A study of the social workers' professionalism in social welfare centers in Daejon area

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, an increasing number of social welfare centers came to be established in Korea. As a lot more of family-based welfare centers were organized in 1990s, there emerged a broad social awareness about them as an outpost for social welfare in the local community. Related people including staff members and professional social workers became more and more interested in setting its role and establishing its social status. In particular, the endeavor to improve the professional level of the social workers has occupied a pivotal role in vitalizing social service programs. In fact, the professionalism of the social welfare centers depends largely upon the professionalism of the related social workers. There are ample reasons that social welfare service should be performed by social workers trained professionally through a series of education in university. Nonetheless, in Korea most of social work service has been underdeveloped due to the lack of professionalism, financial shortage, lack of the government’s policies and direction, and lack of diverse programs. This thesis aims to set a basis to improve the working environment as well as the professional level of social workers particularly in Daejon area by checking upon the performance of their job and analyzing the generated problems. I hope this study will encourage them to undertake their job more efficiently, contributing to the collection of data in the related area of study. For the purpose of this study, I set the scope of research within the 15 social welfare centers located in the city of Daejon. Included therein are executors, managers, social workers, and technique teachers engaged in those organizations. As for the method, I used both the analytical method of primary literature and the method of data survey from questionnaires. In order to heighten the objectivity of the study, I also conducted personal interviews with the related people. The data survey was conducted twice in two different times and occasions. In analyzing the data, I considered the following factors: general features of social workers; performance of job; service efficiency, continuing education; and working environment. Since this study is limited to the city of Daejon, it is difficult to generalize the result of the study. Since other influential factors remain to be reckoned with in addition to the aforementioned seven factors, the result of the study is exposed to its regional limit.