Technology in Social Work

Technology is not free of value and is NOT how we use it that matters. Neither do I think that technology is the driving force for change (Chung 2024). TECH/technology is a sociotechnical ensemble.

I tell my social work students to be like a rubber band in their use of technology: Stretch “rules” or “conventions” to fit new contexts. But maintain your integrity! If the band breaks, it may not be a bad thing. Maybe we have to consider new rules or standards!

We do not want to “move fast and break things” (Taplin 2017). We should not think AI can solve all the problems (Tiah 2024) . We want to move thoughtfully and fix things.

Focal activities are those that technology can do for us but we choose to do anyway because it affords the kind of life we value or professional fulfilment!

We encounter AIs, technologies, and machines that we do not understand and yet we have to engage with them. We have to learn when to trust, when to doubt, and when trust turns to mistrust. Engaging with professional guidelines or standards can help to grapple with the complexity and ambiguity of working with AI blackboxes.

Standards for Using Technology and AI in Social Work. Revise the code of social work ethics to consider (1) standards for technology in social work practice and (2) a fifth responsibility: Social workers’ responsibility to ethical and professional AI-Human interaction**

  • Add a fifth responsibility: “Social workers’ responsibility to ethical and professional AI-Human interaction”
  • Translating values which are abstract into standards or practical ways to use technology can better guide responsible and ethical use.
  • The code of Professional ethics for social work profession in Singapore, 3rd revision (here) placed “Electronic Technology” Figure 1 in “Professional boundaries with clients” within section “A. Social Workers’ Ethical Responsibility to clients”.
  • This is appropriate considering the centrality of the practitioner-client relationship within the core value “Importance of Human Relationships” in the social work profession (Core value 6 “Importance of Human Relationships” in the SG Code; see also Reamer (2018)).
  • The ways in which social workers use technology in social work have created new ways to interact and communicate with client. This in turn has bring into focus questions about the social work-client relationship.
  • In addition, technology also has change various fronts of our profession that do not involve direct interactions with client, including the design and delivery of services, management of data, agency processes, how social workers’ relate with colleagues and supervisors, and promoting of services.
    • Social workers who use technology to provide supervision. Do these tools meet the learning need of the supervisees?
    • SSAs maintain websites and social media accounts that provide information to the public. Are there steps to ensure that the information is accurate, up-to-date, and valid? Are there propoer acknowledgements of the information or work of others?
    • Social workers increasingly use technology to communicate with colleagues either to get information for service referrals, or to understand colleagues’ practices and policies. Do we check if the info is accurate? Do we acknowledge the work and contributions made by other colleagues? Can we use technology to search personal information about colleagues?
    • How do we evaluate technology (e.g., predictive risk models)? What are the metrics we should use to evaluate the system? AI-in-the-loop feedback systems can be use to support social workers’ skills (e.g., Sharma et al. (2023)), how do we check if these systems are useful?
  • Thinking deeper about technology and our ethical responsibilities to clients as well as towards colleagues, practice, profession, and society can help us be in a clearer position in our use of technology.
graph TD
  Mission --> id(6 Core values)
    id(6 Core values) --> id2(5 Ethical Principles) 

  id2(5 Ethical Principles) ==> Client
  id2(5 Ethical Principles) --> Colleagues
  id2(5 Ethical Principles) --> Practice_Settings 
  id2(5 Ethical Principles) --> Profession
  id2(5 Ethical Principles) --> Society

  Client ==> id3(5.Professional boundaries with client)
  Client --> 6.Privacy_Confidential
  Client --> 7.Client_Records

  id3(5.Professional boundaries with client) ==> id4(f. Electronic Technology)
Figure 1: Electonic Technology in the Code

Quality standards relates AI to their broader social context. But we still have to work within the AI system. How can we have meaningful interactions with AI?

Evaluative judgement, emotional reflexivity, and epistemic doubt.

Identify key competencies. Identify key competencies to be considered for social work education and continuing education regarding technology in social work practice**

  • Social work competencies include “core knowledge, values, and skills in working .. in an area of particular practice … [as well as] competence from one situation to another irrespective of case, need, problem, or context” (as cited by McInroy 2021, 546)

  • McInroy (2021) identified five competencies of using ICT which can still be relevant to current tech:

    1. Continuing engagement with technologies
    2. Online professionalism
    3. Assessing risks and opportunities
    4. Applying professional ethics
    5. Thoughtful integration of technology into practice contexts

  • Other competencies need to be considered in the age of gen AI:

    • Data literacy and Computational reasoning. If we encourage workers to apply computational tools to solve complex problems or improve social work processes, we also need to help them develop the “ability to critically self-evaluate the way they apply these tools, and thus be able to reason effectively in a variety of contexts”.

    • Interdisciplinary tech collaborations (Storer et al. 2023)

Key Areas of Inquiry

What are the key areas I am interested to explore in my research on techSW:

Develop the science

Develop good science to drive the design and development of technology in social work

  • Applications build on LLMs are exciting and many of these could be potentially useful for social work practice. However, some apps are not built with strong theoretical conceptualization and evidence from existing social science research.

  • Developing apps for use in social work require skills from computing, AI, or design-thinking. But they also need social science. In social science, we emphasize measurements, causal thinking, rigour models, and theories.

  • If we want to build an AI tool to support social workers’ engagement skills, we need to tap on what we know about social work engagement. Building the science is key to developing effective apps.

Current/Upcoming Work
  • AI-powered Role Playing for Social Work Skills Training
    • Proj site
    • Scoping Review on Social Work Roleplaying using Delberate Practice Model preprint
  • VR/AR in online engagement

Design and develop the interventions that can harness the power of technology

  • One crucial question is how do we evaluate AI interventions? Work in this area, mostly with healthcare interventions, have found inadequate information reported by trials and missing critical information (e.g., what version of the algorithm was used? how were the training/test data selected? what was the interactions between AI and human?). See Ibrahim et al. (2021).

  • Process and outcome evaluation are crucial in understanding the effects of using these interventions. Bibbs et al. (2023) highlighted the need for social work users of technology to “engage in continuous and rapid ethical monitoring” as well as “..duty bound to proactively consider unintended consequences”(p. 141).

Practitioners-AI/TECH Interactions

  • What is the impact of AI on practice? How can workers shape its use?
  • One key concern is the role of clinical supervision in keeping account of workers’ quality of work and practice. How would CS influence workers’ use of AI?
Current/Upcoming Work
  • Evaluating the use of SCRIBE tool in the community
  • Survey to understand worker-AI agents collaboration
  • Developing standards and ethics in the use of AI/TECH in the sector

A Community to Share Ideas, Apps, and Prompts: An Open-Source Community

Go to SWAT:Share!

Interested to work together?

I am just one person. Help, ideas, collaborations are always welcome. I welcome students who are interested to do research in these areas for their dissertations/ISMs/summer jobs. Practitioners in social service agencies and you want to explore more? We can talk over a coffee!

References

Bibbs, Tonya D., Samantha Wolfe-Taylor, Nicole Alston, Mackenzie Barron, Lillian Beaudoin, Samuel Bradley, Alexis Speck Glennon, et al. 2023. “Constructing the Future of Social Work Tech Habits of Mind With the Ethical OS.” Advances in Social Work 23 (1): 132–47. https://doi.org/10.18060/24978.
Chung, Gerard. 2024. “Forum: Social Workers Need to Study Use of AI Carefully.” Straits Time, July. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/forum/forum-social-workers-need-to-study-use-of-ai-carefully.
Ibrahim, Hussein, Xiaoxuan Liu, Samantha Cruz Rivera, David Moher, An-Wen Chan, Matthew R. Sydes, Melanie J. Calvert, and Alastair K. Denniston. 2021. “Reporting Guidelines for Clinical Trials of Artificial Intelligence Interventions: The SPIRIT-AI and CONSORT-AI Guidelines.” Trials 22 (1): 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-020-04951-6.
McInroy, Lauren B. 2021. “Teaching Technology Competencies: A Social Work Practice With Technology Course.” Journal of Social Work Education 57 (3): 545–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2019.1671272.
Reamer, Frederic G. 2018. “Ethical Standards for Social Workers’ Use of Technology: Emerging Consensus.” Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics 15 (2): 7180. https://jswve.org/down load/15-2/articles15-2/71-Use-of-technology-JSWVE-15-2-2018-Fall.pdf.
Sharma, Ashish, Inna W. Lin, Adam S. Miner, David C. Atkins, and Tim Althoff. 2023. “HumanAI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-Based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support.” Nature Machine Intelligence 5 (1): 46–57. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00593-2.
Storer, Heather L., Carol F. Scott, Melissa Eggleston, Toby Shulruff, and Maria Y. Rodriguez. 2023. “Reimagining Social Work’s Digital Future: The Critical Role of Interdisciplinary Tech Partnerships.” Journal of Social Work Education 59 (sup1): 9. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2023.2186994.
Taplin, J. 2017. Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us. Expert Thinking Series. Macmillan. https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=yqZKvgAACAAJ.
Tiah, Adeline. 2024. “Can AI Lighten the Load on Social Workers?” Straits Time, July. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/can-ai-lighten-the-load-on-social-workers.