The Ethical Impact of a Training Programme on Ethical Agency for Social Professionals

ABSTRACT

The authors of this article offered training aimed at strengthening the ethical agency of 15 social workers of three Dutch welfare organisations. At the same time, we conducted research into the ethical impact of the training, making use of an adaptation of the Most Significant Change approach (MSC). The participants wrote stories about the most significant change they experienced as a result of the training which we subsequently discussed with care recipients, care providers, and operational care managers. The MSC-stories revealed that the training was significant for the participants, especially to (re)connect with themselves, and with others, as well as to slow down and engage in collective ethics work. At the same time, the learning processes and the learning outcomes diverged, due to individual differences in professional motivation and working conditions. Most MSC-stories show that the training was significant because it helped the social workers to deal ethically with a specific working condition that they experienced somehow as problematic, mostly because it was at odds with their professional motivation. The stakeholders preferred MSC-stories that focus on the impact on professionals as employees, on their relation with service users or on the actual delivered care.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical agency
• ethics training
• empirical ethics research
• social work
• normative professionalisation
• ethical impact
• Most Significant Change approach
• collective ethics work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ed de Jonge (PhD) is associate professor Professionalisation of Social Work at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. His work focuses on practice-based research and curriculum development. His main interests are (the intersections of) professionalism, ethics, and complexity.

Sabrina Keinemans (PhD) was senior researcher at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences during this project. She is currently professor at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on vulnerable citizens and ethics work of professionals in social care.

Mariël Kanne (PhD) is lecturer in ethics in the Master Advanced Nursing Practice and post doc researcher in the Innovation of Social Work research group at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. Her work focuses on the moral dimension of caring practices in social and health care.

Notes

1 All stories were anonymised and referred to by single letters (A, B, C et cetera) for narratives written after the first module, and double letters (AA, BB, CC, et cetera) for narratives written after the second module. So, story A and AA are written by the same author. The code XX was used for the story which some professionals of the same organisation wrote together after finishing the second module.