Social work practice with refugees and immigrants: a short skill development course

ABSTRACT

Effective social work practice rests on social workers’ ability to build rapport with and understand clients from diverse backgrounds, including refugee and immigrant communities. Yet, few social work programs provide specialized training to work with this population. Moreover, social work students and practitioners often rate their knowledge of and confidence in working with refugees and immigrants as low. This teaching note describes how to teach students to work effectively with refugees and immigrants who are seeking social work services. We describe a brief, for-credit course, including course outcomes, activities, and assignments. Refugee and immigrant guest presenters shared their personal experiences to ensure the course was centered on their voices. A non-equivalent control group design was used to evaluate whether the course increased students’ confidence using population-specific skills from pre to posttest. Students’ confidence using skills improved substantially: the main and interaction effects were very large. These results suggest providing opportunities for applied skill building in a brief course can increase student and practitioner confidence in delivering quality care to refugee and immigrant clients. Social work programs are encouraged to teach students how to work with refugees and immigrants—by offering a brief course or considering a lengthier course for students.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• immigrants
• intervention
• skills
• competency
• social work education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).