Water Into Wine: Using Social Policy Courses to Make MSW Students Interested in Politics

ABSTRACT

Social workers are making a name for themselves in national politics. Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) have MSW degrees. The current chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Karen Bass (D-CA), also has an MSW. Having social workers in elected office allows the profession to directly address the Grand Challenges of the 21st century. But given students’ general disinterest in policy, let alone politics, getting students to take an interest in running for office can be a challenge. How can schools of social work make students interested in running for office? This study uses the results of a survey experiment from the Michigan Law & Social Work Study to show that referring to elected office as a way of making a difference in the community can make MSW students more interested in running for office. However, these results varied across the sample of 545 MSW students. Because of their practice interests and political socialization, many students are impervious to new messaging about the political system. This study finds that the difference-making message is most effective for micropractice students from less politically socialized households. The right messaging can make students more interested. Implications for social work education are discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Butler (1990), for example, finds that 30.4% of her sample of MSW students at the University of Buffalo rated community organizing highly as a future professional practice. The figure was 42% for program or policy design. By contrast, 69.3% rated counseling highly, and another 56.5% did so for family or marital therapy.

² The political science literature consistently finds that individuals are more likely to run for open seats than incumbent seats (Adams & Squire, 1997; Bianco, 1984; Jacobson & Kernell, 1983).

³ The use of the experiment, therefore, accounted for the selection bias concerns of previous research (see Anderson & Harris, 2005; Rocha, 2000; Sather et al., 2007).

⁴ Before administering the experiment to the MLSWS sample, it was pretested on a sample of 624 respondents from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk Platform. The requirements for inclusion were that the respondents had to be over 18 years old and be a U.S. citizen. Respondents were paid $0.25 for completing the survey experiment. The characteristics of the MTurk sample, particularly mother’s education, mirrored those of the MSW sample. Results from the MTurk sample were largely consistent with the results of the MLSWS sample, although there was nothing analogous to how individuals intended to use their MSW degree.

⁵ The political efficacy items included in the survey instrument for the MLSWS were as follows: “I feel I could do as good a job in public office as most other people”; “The problems I most care about can be solved through politics”; “Public officials don’t care much what people like me think”; “Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.” Craig et al. (1990) report a reliability of the political efficacy scale of α=.80. The reliability of the efficacy scale for the MLSW was α = .38.

⁶ Fox and Lawless (2005) do not in practice combine the competitive traits items into a measure of ambition. They are combined in this study for ease of interpretation.

⁷ This is not to say that respondents who chose a different answer might not become micropractitioners in the future, but the first answer choice is the clearest expression of micropractice of the available answer choices.

⁸ Offices included in the local office scale were city council, school board, county commission, and parks commission. Offices included in the higher office scale were mayor, state legislature, and U.S. House or Senate.

⁹ Though an experiment generally controls for unobserved characteristics, ordinary least squares regression accounts for additional factors that may have relationships with a student’s interest in running for office, such as political efficacy.

¹⁰ The theoretical expectations suggest a three-way interaction between the experimental treatment, mother’s education, and micro/macro preference. A regression model using this three-way interaction, as well as the constituent two-way interactions, was applied to the MLSWS data. The results indicated that students who received the social good treatment, had mothers with less than a bachelor’s degree, and were micropractice oriented showed significantly (p<.03) increased interest in running for an open seat on city council.

¹¹ Recall that the MLSWS sample came from fairly well-educated households. Greater than 57% of the sample had mothers who had received a bachelor’s degree. This works against the likelihood of observing an effect, because many students exposed to the social good treatment came from similarly well-educated households. In other words, their preexisting political socialization would make it more difficult for a social policy course to add new, nonredundant information.

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Patrick Meehan

Patrick Meehan received his PhD in social work and political science from the University of Michigan on July 24, 2019. He earned his MSW from the University of Michigan in 2011, and his BSEd from the University of Wisconsin in 2005.