Child Welfare Social Work: An Introduction

Child Welfare Social Work is a brief, introductory text for undergraduate child welfare courses covering the most important policy and practice issues.

Child Welfare Social Work: An Introduction, 1/e

Overview:

Child Welfare Social Work is a brief, introductory text for child welfare courses that covers the most important policy and practice issues.

Features:

• A strong risk assessment chapter (Chapter 4) covers one of the key current issues in child welfare practice, including discussion of false positives and negatives and review of research in the subject area.
• A chapter on doing child welfare (Chapter 10) based on the ethnography of a child welfare office gives students an actual feel for the job of a child welfare social worker.
• Coverage of therapeutic foster care (Chapter 8) includes discussion of the reunification decision and termination of parental rights, as well as the ramifications of each for children.
• Exceptional coverage of inter-professional issues (Chapter 11) includes discussion of the role of judges, attorneys, guardians, special advocates, probation officers, and others.
• Frequent cases and vignettes throughout the text help students relate to the “stories” of each specific example.
• A strong history chapter (Chapter 2) provides a solid background of the field that is essential for any child welfare social worker.

What Reviewers Are Saying…

“I consider the strengths of this book to be its readability, practical vignettes and the comprehensive nature of the information presented. I also like the use of case examples … used throughout that describe common, real-world situations. I will adopt this text for my course.”

“Overall, I am impressed with this text; I particularly like the emphasis on the systems approach throughout. It is much more practical than the text I am currently using and really focuses on the reality of working with children. Chapter 4 on risk assessment in child welfare was the strength of this text and I might adopt it based solely on this chapter”.