| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 社會政策與社會工作學系 === 95 === The Law for Qualified Social Workers enacted in 1997 has been an important impact on the development of Taiwanese social work education and professionalism. However, whether social workers now have been recognized as a profession with better employment conditions, or, instead of that results, more social workers feel hopeless and want to quit? This remains as a question unanswered. According to the study conducted by Zhong Mei-Chi in 1996, the university social work graduates may have nearly 28% leaving rate. They might experience career bottleneck due to all sorts of influential factors, even or further feel dissatisfied with social work professionalism, causing social work manpower to drain repeatedly. This study reviews years prior to 1980, the 1980s, and the 1990s, to see several different generations of social workers in their employment field situation, discovering that the social workers in the 2000s are facing more uncertainty in comparison to those prior decades, and have more chances of floating around. For this reason, we name the current generation as ‘floating generation’. At the same time in reviewing the related employment literatures as well as those investigation reports, we also find the past researchers focusing more on quantitative investigation and the factors contributed to job leave; they did not pay much attention or lack of in-dept analysis to the feelings, experiences and opinions of the social workers who decide to leave the job and no longer willing to be social workers. Therefore, this study would not just like to pay attention to the past generations of social work employment, but also to understand more of the current employment situation of those ‘floating generation’ youth social workers, as well as to analysis those factors that contribute to job-leave and the decision of no longer to be social workers. Through dialogue with the people who engage in social work employment, we will rethink the meaning of social work professionalism.
To match the research purposes, this study adopts the qualitative research strategy as the first priority and quantitative research strategy as next. There are two main parts in this thesis. First, we select ten popular domestic social work websites and carry out the content analysis of their message boards, conducting a thoroughly browsing and inspection for the previous six years contents (Year 2001 to 2006). Those messages are especially screened out if more clearly relating to job-leave intention or decision to quit being social workers, as well as those messages that have deeper comments on Taiwan’s social work professionalism. According to the above, this study totally intercepted 131 pieces of message texts contents, and in between this research has quoted 109 pieces of these messages. Through this content analysis, it may help us to understand better how social workers perceive their working conditions and career development, as well as the popular topics under Taiwan’s social work professionalism, in order to describe the general picture of social work employment in floating generation. Second, we adopt quantitative and semi-structural in-depth interview to know the vivid working experiences of those young social workers. This study is taking 2006 as a basis, in principle the young social workers interviewed must graduate within five years (2002 to 2006), working in the social work for a period of time but left the job; however, if the cases fulfill those requirements, but graduated over five years and ages are under 30 years old, they could also be in our interviewing cases.
After the process of literature review, the message text content analysis and in-depth interview, we conclude that there are three main reasons affecting young social workers’ decision to quit their jobs, including ‘individual factor’, ‘job characteristic factor’, and ‘external environmental factor’. According to the calculation of the response numbers in the message board text content analysis, the factors affecting ‘floating generation’ young social workers to leave the job or unwilling to be social workers, ‘job characteristic factor’ has 305 times, higher than ‘external environmental factor’ 140 times and ‘individual factor’ 28 times. Our research discovers that the ‘floating generation’ young social workers pay more attention to their own working characteristics in comparison to the attention they pay toward developing working profession. Regarding the decision process of young social workers’ quitting, five stages are found: ‘ready to go, wield the armed force sandy field’, ‘newly recruit soldiers, goes forth to the battlefield’, ‘beacon rises from all directions, crisis-ridden’, ‘fatally fires, dies in front of the enemy’, and ‘wields sandy field, heroic recurrence’. Finally from these research findings and triangle examination, we propose two core questions for reconsideration of social work professionalism in Taiwan, the first is the gap between academic and practical training, and the second is the lacking of effective social work model in our country. These two questions require a more intensive collaboration between the academic and the practice.
|
|---|
