Power Relations And Role Dilemmas Faced By Social Work Interns From A Field Perspective

As the "locomotive" of the social work profession,medical social work can best reflect the development degree and professional capacity building of the social work profession.At the same time,social work is a major that emphasizes practice,and "internship",as a compulsory course for social work students in colleges and universities,plays an important role in enriching students’ personal experience and testing theories.However,under the influence of many factors,college students who enter the hospital field for internship face different degrees of power pressure and role dilemma.Unlike the traditional embedded research perspective,Bourdieu’s field theory provides us with a new research perspective.Using the concepts of "field","capital" and "habit" in field theory,this study focuses on forming an analytical framework for social work students to enter hospital field internship from university field,analyzing what kind of power oppression and role impact on college interns due to the difference between the quantity and quality of various capital holdings in different fields,and exploring what kind of role difficulties medical social work interns fall into.Through field observation and interview investigation,this paper analyzes the possible factors affecting medical social worker interns in the field from two dimensions:the objective cultural capital in the vertical university field,the power capital of the hospital field administrative system,and the habitual differences and role contradictions between horizontal fields.The vertical dimension mainly discusses the top-down power structure formed in the two fields of universities and hospitals,the occupation and distribution of resources in the field,and the position of individuals in the field.The horizontal dimension mainly discusses the conflicts and contradictions formed by the different habits of individuals in the field under the joint influence of multiple subjects,after individual interns enter the hospital field horizontally from the university field,and explore what kind of role such conflicts and contradictions have on medical social worker interns.It is found that cultural capital,as the field capital that dominates the field of universities,not only provides support for interns to enter the hospital field,but also causes certain power oppression to interns.In the hospital field,the weak position of the social work department in the administrative power system also indirectly makes it difficult for interns to obtain resource support,and the idea of the social work department expecting interns to do something to increase the share of social capital has invisibly formed a role pressure on interns.In the two field changes from the social work department to the department and from the department to the ward,the interns received different attention and role expectations when facing different individuals in the field,and this expectation was often very different from the role perception of the interns themselves,because the power relations in different fields were different.Combining the analysis of two dimensions,this paper finally puts forward strategic suggestions on the interns themselves,the social work profession of colleges and universities and the hospital system,in order to solve the objective role dilemma of social work interns in the internship process.