The Study Into The Social Work Students’ Acceptance Towards Vulnerable Minorities

With the rapid development of society, large numbers of vulnerable groups appear. It calls for social workers to provide assistance and services for vulnerable groups. However, due to the differences of the living environment, values, etc., there may be a certain degree of prejudice and discrimination when social workers contact with these vulnerable groups. In the colleges and universities, most professional education of social work focuses only on teaching theoretical knowledge and skills, whereas ignores to cultivate the professional values of social work. Especially when building professional relationships initially, it is very important to implement the principle of acceptance, which influences the successful completeness of the entire service work. Therefore, it is of great significance to enhance the students’ acceptance towards vulnerable groups for the future practical service.In this thesis, drug groups are taken as the representative of the vulnerable groups. Imagined intergroup contact and role playing are chosen to be explored whether they can enhance social work students’ acceptance towards vulnerable groups. Domestic and foreign research in the field of psychology shows that imagined intergroup contact is to ask participants to imagine making contact with out-group members, which can improve intergroup attitudes and behavior. Role-playing has been acknowledged as an important method in social work curriculum, which could achieve the purpose of improving students’ professional skills through the simulation of the context and the role. In this study, social work students in Nanjing University are chosen as subjects. With the method of group work, we interfered with the students by imagined intergroup contact and role playing, and used the acceptance questionnaire to measure before and after the intervention. It is found that the influence on the enhancement of social work students to accept drug groups by imagined contact is not significant, while the influence on the enhancement of social work students to accept drug groups by role-playing is remarkable.Finally, the findings are discussed. We affirmed the feasibility and effectiveness that the role playing method can enhance social work students’acceptance towards the vulnerable groups, and tried to find out the reason that imagined contact was failed. In addition, the suggestions and prospects for the future research were brought forward.