The Social Work Podcast

Episode 64: Today's Social Work Podcast is a "behind the scenes" look at the Social Work Podcast. Danielle Parrish, social work faculty at the University of Houston, interviews the founder and host, Jonathan Singer, about how the Social Work Podcast started, how he selects his topics and the people that he interviews and how after the interview the podcast is actually produced and then finally how he uses Twitter, Facebook, and Google Voice [215.948-2456] to connect with listeners. And now on to Episode 64 of the Social Work Podcast: Behind the Scenes at the Social Work Podcast: Interview with Jonathan Singer

Happy New Year to all of the listeners of the Social Work Podcast. There are 100,000 of you from 178 countries. You make up an amazing community. Thanks so much for listening and making the Social Work Podcast one of the professions most visible resources.

Episode 63: Today's Social Work Podcast is a broad overview of current policies and practices associated with adoption in the United States. According to the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, 6 in 10 Americans have had experience with adoption, meaning you, or a family member or close friend was adopted, adopted a child, or put a child up for adoption. Although most Americans have experience with adoption, as you'll hear in today's interview, the world of adoption is incredibly complex. For example, is it ever acceptable to consider the race of a prospective adoptive family when making placement decisions? For example, you're looking to place an African American child. You have three prospective adoptive families - two African American and one White. Assuming all things are equal, could you use race as an exclusionary criterion? What about if the child was White, Latino, or Native American? If you know the answer - congratulations. If not, keep listening. And even if you know the answer, keep listening. My guest, Dr. Ruth McRoy, has been an academician, researcher, practitioner, trainer and lecturer in the field for over 30 years. She is a member of the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC) Board and is a Senior Research Fellow and member of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute Board. In today's conversation, Ruth talks about different kinds of adoptions such as transracial, international, infant placement, and foster care adoption. She talks about the role of the social worker in adoption, from pre-placement to post-placement. She talks about some of the national and international laws that regulate adoption, such as the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, and the Hague Convention. We end today's conversation with some resources that you can tap for more information about adoption, including the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, the National Resource Center for Adoption, AdoptUsKids.org, and the North American Counsel on Adoptable Children. One quick word about today's Social Work Podcast: I recorded the interview with my Zoom H2 digital recorder. Ruth and I were sitting in an empty lecture hall at the Oregon Convention Center during the Annual Program Meeting of the Council on Social Work Education. Empty rooms are something of a commodity at conventions and I've done my best to edit out the sounds of people opening and closing the door looking for their own place to get some privacy. And now, without further ado, on to Episode 63 of the Social Work Podcast: Adoption Policy and Practice in the USA: Interview with Ruth McRoy, Ph.D.

Episode 62: Risk for suicide among gay youth has caught a lot of attention in the American media as of late. There have been a number of youth who have been bullied because they have been gay or perceived to be gay and who have consequently died by suicide. Dan Savage and friends and colleagues and supporters have put together an amazing project called "It Gets Better" (http://www.itgetsbetterproject.com/) focusing on the issue of youth suicide for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, question and queer teens. Now there is good reason for this. According to the U.S. Government's Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide, gay and lesbian youth bear an increased risk of suicide, substance abuse, school problems, and isolation because of a "hostile and condemning environment, verbal and physical abuse, rejection and isolation from [peers and family]" (Gibson, 1989). Social worker and pioneer gay and lesbian researcher Caitlin Ryan, found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults who reported higher levels of family rejection during adolescence were 8.4 times more likely to report having attempted suicide, 5.9 times more likely to report high levels of depression, 3.4 times more likely to use illegal drugs, and 3.4 times more likely to report having engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse compared with peers from families that reported no or low levels of family rejection. So, here's the thing. Families who reject their kids are doing their kids a huge disservice. And that's the point of today's podcast. Today I'm talking with Dr. Cynthia Conley about the concerns of heterosexual parents of gay and lesbian youth. Cynthia Conley, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her research focuses on parental concerns about having gay and lesbian children. Currently, Professor Conley is investigating the types of clinical interventions used with heterosexual parents of gay and lesbian children to develop a best practice model to improve family cohesion during the coming out crisis. Professor Conley has worked with LGBT adolescents and their parents since the late 1990s, focusing on heterosexual parent’s acceptance of their LGBT children. She provides consultation to organizations, educational institutions, and service providers on working with families of LGBT children. She received her B.A. from Purdue University, her MSW from Indiana University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Louisville. So here's the pop quiz for you: When lesbian or gay youth come out to their parents, what concerns are their parents most likely to have? Well, I'm not going to answer - you'll have to listen to the podcast for that. And I hope you like it. So, on to episode 62 of the Social Work Podcast, Concerns of Parents of Gays and Lesbians: An Interview with Dr. Cynthia Conley. To read more about this episode, or the Social Work Podcast, please visit https://www.socialworkpodcast.com.

Episode 61: We've all heard the Serenity prayer. Even if you don't know what it is called, you'll recognize it by the first few words... "God grant me the serenity..." The serenity prayer is synonymous with Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-step programs. Hundreds of millions of people have used the serenity prayer to fight and beat addiction. And it is only three lines and 25 words. Most episodes of the social work podcast take huge topics - like stigma, suicide, and cognitive-behavior therapy, and try to distill them into 30-minute overviews. Today's podcast flips that on its head. Today we're spending over thirty minutes to unpack 25 words. My hope is that listeners learn something about the Serenity prayer - something that they can incorporate into their social work education or practice. In today's social work podcast, I spoke with Eileen Flanagan, author of the award winning book, "The Wisdom to know the difference: When to make a change - and when to let go." Her book was endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She holds a B.A. from Duke and an M.A. from Yale and teaches at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can read more about her work at her website, http://www.eileenflanagan.com. To read more about this episode, or the Social Work Podcast, please visit https://www.socialworkpodcast.com.

Episode 60: Today's Social Work Podcast is on social skills training with children and adolescents. My guest, Craig Winston LeCroy defines social skills as "a complex set of skills that facilitate the successful interactions between peers, parents, teachers, and other adults" (LeCroy, 2009, 653). Social skills include everything from dress and behavior codes, to rules about what, when, and how to say or not to say something. Social skills training is a form of behavior therapy, and as such focuses on behaviors, rather than thoughts or feelings, as the targets for change. Traditional behavior modification is often thought of in terms of task completion, for example, using star charts to get kids to clean their rooms or do homework. But in social skills training, behavior modification principles are used to teach people skills that help them to be successful in social situations. I encountered an example of social skills training last week with my 2 1/2 year old daughter. My daughter's daycare is really good about letting us know what the kids did during the day. My wife and I often use that information as the basis for conversations with our daughter. During dinner, we'll ask questions like, "Did anyone plant flowers today?" to which my daughter has typically has yelled out an enthusiastic, "me!" Last week we were playing this game and I asked, "Did anyone pretend to be a train today?" For the first time since she could talk, my daughter sat there in silence. Was she ignoring my question? No. She was answering my question non-verbally. She was raising her hand. My wife and I were shocked. You're probably not shocked to learn that at home, my wife and I don't raise our hands in response to questions. So, who is teaching her to raise her hand? The next day, I went to pick her up from preschool, a classroom that she transitioned into about three weeks ago. The class was sitting in a circle and her teacher was asking the class questions. My daughter and her little friends were all answering by raising their hands. Clearly this is where she had learned this very specific social skill – that you answer questions by raising your hand, not by shouting. I don't know how her teacher did it, but I suspect that she used basic behavior modification strategies such as explaining the new behavior, modeling it, and consistently reinforcing it by rewarding those who did it, and punishing (either by calling out or ignoring) those who did not. I also suspect that my daughter learned by watching her older classmates do it. While part of me was sad to see that my daughter's enthusiastic "me" had been converted into a very calm, silent, and socially acceptable raised hand, another part of me understood that becoming Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter was not in her best interest. Now, I can tell you that when I was working with kids who were getting expelled for talking back to their teachers, arrested for provoking the cops, or getting beaten up because they managed to say exactly the wrong thing to the wrong person, hearing a parental anecdote about a toddler raising her hand would have left me wanting just a little bit more. So I asked one of social work's leading experts, Craig Winston LeCroy, professor of social work at Arizona State University, to talk with us about social skills training for children and adolescents. Professor LeCroy has developed and tested social skills prevention and intervention programs, including a social skills-based prevention program for adolescent girls (LeCroy, 2001), a social skills program for training home visitors (LeCroy & Whitaker, 2005), and an empirically based treatment manual outlining a social skills program for middle school students (LeCroy, 2008). In today's interview, Craig defines social skills training and emphasizes fit between social skills training and the ecological and strengths orientation of social work. He talks about the how social workers can effectively train youth in social skills, giving particular emphasis to the concepts of overlearning, role playing and modeling. He talks about providing skills training in groups, as well as an alternative to traditional expressive play therapy - individual child skill therapy. Craig emphasizes that successful social skills training requires knowledge of specific situations and can therefore be very culturally responsive. He talks about how early social skills training programs focused on juvenile delinquency, and discusses some of the existing evidence, particularly around modeling, to support social skills training as an effective intervention. Craig talks about his current research on using social skills in a universal prevention program with adolescent girls called "Empowering Adolescent Girls." We finish our conversation with a discussion of resources around social skills training. One quick word about today's social work podcast: I recorded it using a Zoom H2 recorder on location at the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) annual conference. If you listen closely you can hear the sounds of San Francisco in the background: a clock chiming, busses loading and unloading passengers, and even some pigeons congregating outside of the interview room. They don't detract from the interview, but I wanted to give fair warning in case you were listening to this podcast anywhere were those sounds might be cause for alarm. So, without further ado, on to Episode 60 of the Social Work Podcast, Social Skills Training with Children and Adolescents: Interview with Craig LeCroy, Ph.D.

Episode 59: Today's Social Work Podcast is on incorporating religion and spirituality into social work practice with African Americans. Or at least that's the official title. The unofficial title is, "If my client brings God into the conversation, what should I do?" I spoke with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, best-selling author, multicultural researcher, family therapist and clinical trainer, and recipient of awards from the American Psychological Association, Association of Black Psychologists, and the American Family Therapy academy. When I was a social work intern, I worked with an African American mother who had AIDS and whose 6 children were HIV+. The father of her children had been an IV drug user who had died of AIDS. The mother was in poor health, and rarely sought her own treatment. I had a hard time tracking her down because she spent most of the day, every day, on public transportation with one child or another taking them to and from medical appointments. I remember being on the bus with her one day (because that was only place I could meet with her), listening to her talk about how she had successfully fought hospital administration to get treatment for one of her kids. Being the eager social work student that I was, fully prepared to acknowledge my clients strengths and resources, I told her that I was in awe of her strength. "How do you do it?" I asked her. Her response totally caught me off guard. She said, "The good lord will give me only as much as I can handle." I had no idea how to respond. See, I was expecting her to say something like, "a parent will do what a parent has to do," or maybe, "I don't know either; I sure could use a vacation." I expected her response to be much more... textbook? You know, the kind of response that I had read about in my textbooks so that I could follow up with, "and so if you took a vacation, what would be different?" Which really makes no sense at all since she was obviously not about to zip off to the Dominican Republic for a week at the beach. Not so textbook. In that moment, on the bus, I found myself completely at a loss for words. Not that I didn't have a million things running through my head, I did. I just thought they all sounded stupid. On one level I was trying to figure out what she meant: "ok. She said that the good lord will give her only as much as she can handle... does that mean that when she can't handle any more, she'll die? or that the good lord knows exactly how much she can handle and then when she can't handle any more the good lord will stop giving her things to handle, or is there a third option I'm just not thinking about. I mean, I'm just a social work intern, I'm not sure what I can offer above and beyond what the "good lord" can offer her, so what now?" Ok, so in case you got lost in all of my self-talk here's a quick recap. I asked my client a question. She responded. That's it. What should have come next was me saying something intelligent. Instead, what I said was, "Wow." So why did I have such a hard time coming up with an appropriate response? Well, for one, I thought that as a social worker I should know what my client meant, and I should understand what she meant... Another things was that I had a different belief system from my client and it didn't seem right to disagree with her, nor did it seem right to agree with her, because that wouldn't be genuine. My social work education did not prepare me to deal with issues of religion and spirituality. My textbooks didn't provide me with templates for how to respond when my clients brought up the issue of God. Prior to 2001, accreditation guidelines from the Council on Social Work Education didn't require schools to include spiritual assessment in the biopsychosocial assessment, which I talk about in more detail in Episode 2, Biopsychosocial-spiritual Assessment and Mental Status Exam. Another reason is that there has been a long and contentious relationship between religion and the helping professions. Religion was either the answer or the problem. On one hand, the social work profession is in part rooted in the Friendly Visitor movement which believed that the right version of religion was the answer to poverty. On the other hand, you have Freud's legacy of religion being considered an obsessional neurosis. So for many providers, the only safe middle ground was "Religion is not within my scope of practice and therefore I'm not going to deal with it at all." Well, today's guest, Nancy Boyd Franklin, would say that when religion or spirituality is part of a client's life, the effective provider has to be able to deal with and be willing to engage in conversations about it. "Wow" just won't cut it. She would see this mother's belief in the power of the good lord as a sign of strength and resilience, not weakness or pathology. She would also say that I could have simply responded to the mother's statement by saying, "tell me more." In today's interview, Nancy spoke about the heterogeneity of beliefs among Black Americans. She and I talked about the difference between religion and spirituality, what a church family is and why it is so important, whether or not social workers should ask about religion and spirituality if clients don't bring it up, and what the role of religion and spirituality is in traditional African American families. I interviewed Nancy at Temple University's School of Social Work. She was the invited speaker for the school's lecture series on social work research. For more information about Temple's School of Social Work, or the research lecture series, please visit their website at www.temple.edu/ssa.org. And now, without further ado, on to episode 59 of the Social Work Podcast. Incorporating religion and spirituality into social work practice with African Americans: Interview with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Ph.D. For links to resources mentioned in this episode, or other episodes on social work topics, please visit our website at https://socialworkpodcast.com

Episode 58: Let's be honest. You didn't become a social worker because you wanted to travel the world. Even if you're someone who has the travel bug - You're a social worker. You're not making a whole lot of money? How are you going to finance it? Today's Social Work Podcast is about how social workers can work abroad. So, if you're interested in learning more about working abroad means, if you're really interested in traveling to the U.K., or Australia. If you have questions about, "Can I bring my cat?", "Do I need a license," "Do I have to be a community organizer, do I have to be a policy person, can I do direct practice?" this podcast is for you - all of these questions will be answered. In today's Social Work Podcast I speak with David Dininio, Recruitment Manager for HCL Social Care International. David and his team of consultants are responsible for collaborating with US and Canadian Social Workers to help them achieve their dream of working abroad in the UK and Australia. To read more about working abroad, and to hear other podcasts, please visit the Social Work Podcast website at https://socialworkpodcast.com.

Episode 57: Today's Social Work Podcast is on community-based prevention services for children and adolescents. I spoke with Dr. Richard Catalano, who along with David Hawkins, developed Communities That Care, a prevention-planning system that promotes the positive development of children and youth and prevents problem behaviors, including substance use, delinquency, teen pregnancy, school drop-out and violence. It is a system for identifying community needs, matching those needs to evidence-based prevention programs, and evaluating the outcomes. The system has been used in dozens of communities around the United States, and has demonstrated effectiveness in reducing problem behaviors and promoting positive youth development. But before we get to the interview, I want you to imagine for a moment how you would work with a pregnant 16-year old sexual abuse survivor who was addicted to crack, semi-illiterate, suicidal, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and whose baby daddy was prostituting her in exchange for drugs. Ok, got your treatment plan figured out? If you’re thinking, "I know I need to address her suicidality first, but after that, I’m not really sure," then you’d be right, and you’re probably not alone. Most social workers, most service providers, treat individual or family problems once they’ve occurred. And this young woman has a lot of problems. So, what if I suggested that the best place to start with this client was 17 years ago, before she was born, before she was raped, before she turned to drugs to dull her pain or perhaps used drugs to make herself look cooler to her father-figure boyfriend pimp? What if I suggested that the best use of time and money was in preventing these problems from occurring in the first place? If you’re with me on this one, you’re not alone. In 2006, the New Yorker published an article by Katherine Boo (2006, Feb 6) called "Swamp Nurse." The story takes place about an hour southwest of New Orleans, Louisiana, a place where infant mortality, illiteracy rates, and child poverty are among the highest in the country. The title, Swamp Nurse, refers to a group of nurses who do home visits with low-income women during pregnancy and work with them until their child turns two. These nurses are expected to, and I’m not making this up, reduce infant mortality, illiteracy rates and child poverty, and in turn improve the overall health, education, and economic self-sufficiency of these families and consequently the community as a whole. Uh huh. All through home visits. I know. And the most remarkable part? They did it, more or less. How? They were part of a decades-old prevention program called the Nurse-Family Partnership (www.nursefamilypartnership.org/About/What-we-do). These nurses promoted the use of prenatal care, healthy eating, not using cigarettes, alcohol or illegal drugs. They worked with parents to provide responsible and competent care – and to a 16 year old that might include getting them to understand that it is their job to make their baby feel loved, not the other way around. And they helped the parents plan for their future, including future pregnancies, education, and jobs. This program works because it prevents certain behaviors by promoting others. That is the essence of prevention programs. And, according to Dr. Catalano, there are tons of effective prevention programs out there. The trick is to figure which ones are right for your community. Benjamin Franklin famously said, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This idea, that prevention is a better value for the money that cure, is at the core of public health policy and one of the most compelling arguments for investing in prevention services. Steve Aos, associate director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy has done cost-benefit analyses on dozens of prevention programs, and found that while most programs do not have a 16:1 return ratio, there are many programs out there that return $3 and $4 dollars per dollar invested. Oh, and the Nurse-Family Partnership? $2.88 per dollar. Steve and his colleagues calculated that by spending $9100 per mother, the Nurse-Family Partnership produced over $26,000 in benefit (www.wa.gov/wsipp). Let’s come back to our 16-year old crack addicted suicidal prostitute for a minute. If she had been involved with a program, or a series of programs that promoted parent-child bonding, emotional, cognitive, behavioral and moral competence, self-determination, belief in the future, and half a dozen other concepts that are included under in the broad heading of positive development, it is likely that she would have never become my client. In order to learn more about how this might happen at a community level, I spoke with Dr. Richard Catalano, or "Rico" as he asked me to call him. Rico is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence and the Director of the Social Development Research Group in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. He has published over 225 articles and book chapters, and his work has been recognized by practitioners; criminologists; and prevention scientists. I asked Rico to talk about some of the persistent problems that youth in America face and why we haven’t been able to overcome them. He talked about why he went from being a treatment researcher to a prevention researcher. We talked about the benefits of taking a community-based approach to prevention. Rico described the Communities That Care prevention system, and talked about what makes it an effective approach to preventing adolescent behavior problems and promoting positive development of children and youth. I interviewed Rico at Temple University’s School of Social Work. He was the invited speaker for the school’s lecture series on social work research. For more information about Temple’s School of Social Work, or the research lecture series, please visit their website at www.temple.edu/ssa.org To read more about Communities That Care, and to hear other podcasts, please visit the Social Work Podcast website at https://socialworkpodcast.com.

Episode 56: Today's podcast is on Suicide and Black American Males. Why suicide and Black Americans? Well, there is a belief among most Americans, and particularly among African American adults, that Black Americans do not kill themselves (Joe, 2006). When we think of violent death among Black Americans we think of homicide. Suicide is thought of as a “White” problem. While it is true that suicide was not a leading cause of death for African Americans 40 years ago, today it is the third leading cause of deaths among African Americans 15 – 24 years of age. So why Black American Males specifically? Well, among all racial and ethnic groups, the suicide rate is lowest among Black American females. Given that Black American males, particularly youth, are over-represented in social services, social workers need to be aware of the risk for suicide, and prepared to provide potentially life-saving services. One thing that makes social workers professionals is that we are trained to see things that others do not. Most of us have not been trained to see suicide as an important issue in the Black American community. It is my hope that after hearing today's guest, Dr. Sean Joe from the University of Michigan, you will be more likely to see suicide among Black American males as an important clinical and programmatic issue. Dr. Joe holds a joint position as associate professor in the School of Social Work and the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan's School of Medicine. He is also a faculty associate with the Program for Research on Black Americans at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Dr. Joe is a nationally recognized authority on suicidal behavior among African Americans. He is the 2009 recipient of the Edwin Shneidman Award from the American Association of Suicidology for outstanding contributions in research to the field of suicide studies and the 2008 recipient of the Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work and Research. He serves on the board of the Suicide Prevention Action Network (SPAN USA), the scientific advisory board of the National Organization of People of Color Against Suicide, and the editorial board of Advancing Suicide Prevention, a policy magazine. He is co-chair of the Emerging Scholars Interdisciplinary Network (ESIN) Research Study Group on African American Suicide, a national interdisciplinary group of researchers committed to advancing research in this area. He has published extensively in the areas of suicide, violence, and firearm-related violence. In today's podcast, Sean talks why it is important to look at the suicide rate among Black American males, specifically adolescent males. He talks about how recent research has started to put together a profile for Black American Males most at risk for suicide, and the factors that seem to protect against suicide. He talks about some of the social and historical factors associated with the increase in suicide rates among Black Americans. Sean gives an example of how he talks with Black Americans about suicide and stigma. We talked about recommendations for social workers who are working with Black American males who might be suicidal, including talking about faith, valuing that child, having a vision of that child as an adult, and healthy masculinity. Sean discussed some resources for social workers interested in learning more about this topic. We ended the interview with Sean extending an invitation to social work clinicians and researchers to join him to better understand suicide and suicidal behaviors in Black Americans. One quick word about today's podcast: I recorded today's podcast using a Zoom H2 recorder on location at the Society for Social Work Research annual conference. If you listen closely you can hear the sounds of San Francisco in the background: a clock chiming, busses loading and unloading passengers, and even some pigeons congregating outside of the interview room. They don't detract from the interview, but I wanted to give fair warning in case you were listening to this podcast anywhere were those sounds might be cause for alarm. To read more about theories for clinical social work practice, and to hear other podcasts, please visit the Social Work Podcast website at https://socialworkpodcast.com.