| How lawmakers, government administrators, funding agencies, and the public at large perceive social work maybe a determinant of the level of support that will be given to the profession and its services. These perceptions of social work maybe influenced, and sometimes formed, by how social work is portrayed in the media.;A content analysis of the articles, carried out by independent coders, revealed that the image of social work in U.S. newspapers was largely positive and was strikingly more so than the image of social work in the UK press, in which negative stories outnumbered positive ones. In both the U.S. and the UK, the field of child welfare and social workers' functioning in a monitoring role accounted for a disproportionate share of the negative images. A multiple regression analysis suggested that type of story (scandal versus other), field of practice (child welfare versus other), role of social work (monitor versus other), and country (U.S. versus UK), each make a significant independent contribution to how the image of social work is rated, with the type of story (scandal versus other) emerging as the strongest predictor of social work image. All else being equal, stories that focus on scandals, focus on child welfare, and portray social workers as monitors are negatively associated with social work image; stories in U.S. newspapers tend to be positively associated with social work image.;In both the U.S. and UK, the more positive images were found in articles in which social workers were cited as experts, which described program innovations, or which portrayed interesting practice activities or particular social workers.;This study examined the image of social work presented in 60 major daily newspapers in the U.S., UK, and Canada. The study population consisted of a sample of four "reconstructed weeks" randomly selected over a five-year period (1995 through 1999). All articles (n = 433) with key words indicating "social work" were retrieved from a full-text, computerized database (LEXIS-NEXIS). From the sample of 433 articles, 258 (60%) were from U.S. newspapers, 141 (32%) were from UK newspapers, and 34 (8%) were from Canadian newspapers. |
