References
Jonathan, S. & Karen, S. (2011). School Social Workers' Experiences with Youth Suicidal Behavior: An Exploratory Study. Washington DC: National Association of Social Workers.
A succession of multivariate ANOVAs were carried out with SSWs experiences and exposure to different school levels being the dependent variables, and with six demographic variables as independent variables. The six independent variables include: gender, age, race, years of work with practice, grade level with experience and location of work. This study wanted to establish and describe the experiences of SSW’s with suicidal students, and to find out whether there existed differences between SSWs working at different school levels. The hypothesis is summarized as follows;
- Hypotheses 1 (null): The SSWs have had no significant experiences with suicidal students.
- Hypotheses 2 (null): There were no significant differences between the SSWs working at different school levels
The sample was obtained from the Midwest School Social Work Council (MSSWC), the purpose of which was to support and promote the professional development of the school Social practice. The collected sample data represented SSWs in the suburban (49.7 percent), urban (26.6 percent), and rural (23.6 percent) schools. Because SSWs can potentially work at more than one level of school respondents were asked to choose only one level on which to base their answers. The independent variable in the study is suicide rate while diversity and cyber bullying were analyzed as the dependent variables.
Because the data was both continuous and ordinal, then it was important to conduct two sets of analysis. The analysis of the continuous data was conducted using a series of one-way ANOVA’s with a planned post hoc analyses using Turkey’s HSD. The ordinal part of data was run and analyzed using a single multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). To determine whether differences existed on the discrete numbers that SSWs reported on their experiences working with suicidal youths, the authors conducted MANOVA. This indicates that the MANVA was conducted on the dependent variables. Also to examine the school-level effect on SSWs’ responses to the ordinal data, A MANOVA was conducted with an alpha level of .05. The main effect for school level approached significance [F (12, 754) = 1.72, p = .058, h2 = .027] (Jonathan & Karen, 2011).
The study presented the baseline information regarding the experiences, beliefs, attitudes and role of SSWs with suicide students. The research study surveyed (N = 399) who comprised of School Social Workers from the 11-state Midwest Council on. The results showed considerable SSW concern with desperate youths: around 88 percent of the SSWs social workers indicted that they had worked with suicidal youths for the last two years. a good number SSWs were very prepared and confident to work with suicidal youths, expressed self-confidence recognizing the risk factors of suicide and creating apt referrals, and were extremely conversant on policies relating to school suicide.