Reactions of students to different settings of field experience

Abstract

The study assessed Israeli students’ emotional–experiential reaction and attitude to different client populations, following a week-long experience in one of five social services settings. The study provides preliminary findings regarding the implications of first year students’ experience on their emphatic skills, a subject that generally has not received adequate scholarly attention. Using a purpose-built, self-administered questionnaire, we found students’ emotional–experiential response to their experience differed by the setting in which they were placed, being lowest in the Bedouin oriented services, intermediate among those placed in juvenile correction services, and highest in mental health, adult and child disability services. Responses were independent of all other explanatory variables, including sex, cognitive ability, previous training experience and perceptual shifts concerning the population served. We discuss possible reasons for these differences.

Keywords:

• field experience in Israel
• emotional reaction

Notes

1. The remaining eigenvalues were 1.05, 0.907, 0.383, 0.313, and 0.101.

2. MAD is the median absolute deviation from the mean, a robust alternative to the standard deviation (Verzani 2004).

3. Bold lines in each box represent the group median, box limits are the upper and lower quartiles, and points represent outliers (Tukey 1977, Verzani 2004).