Integrating Financial and Economic Justice Content into Social Work Education

ABSTRACT

Teaching financial and economic justice content is an important feature of social work education. Such content helps students effectively address financial challenges with their clients, transform communities, and advocate for appropriate economic policies. Despite initial efforts by CSWE and others, many social work educators still do not teach financial and economic justice content in their courses. Using the diffusion of innovation theory, this paper assesses what sociodemographic, personal, and education related factors impact the odds of teaching financial and economic justice content. The study used original survey data (n = 163) from social work educators and binary logistic regression modeling techniques. Results suggest that the social work educator’s highest achieved education level, as well as the type of course taught, play a meaningful role in determining the odds of teaching the content. Furthermore, perceived relevance has a strong, positive association with the odds of teaching the content. These findings suggest that those seeking to increase the prevalence of financial and economic justice content in social work education can target their efforts on a few key intervention points, and that policy measures supporting the integration of the content have yet to be implemented by educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Social work
• education
• financial
• economic
• justice

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by NIH Grant #1C06 RR 022088-01, and by the University of Maryland School of Social Work PhD program. Appreciation is extended to Bethany Lee for her assistance in overseeing the project and the development of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [1C06 RR 022088-01] and the University of Maryland School of Social Work PhD Program