Introduction to Social Work

This textbook review is on 'Introduction to Social Work' subtitled An Advocacy-based Profession in its' 3rd edition published Sage Publications. This book is written by a team of writers by the names of Lisa E. Cox; Carolyn J. Tice and Dennis D. Long in 2022. I have studied Social work from a Human services perspective and have seen how the two fields are the same yet different.

The rationale of the textbook, in my opinion, is to give the students and others who are interested in this field what it means to be a social worker/human service worker or a counselor in the world today. In reading this textbook as a reviewer I found it easy to read for being a paperback text it is light and one can read it anywhere even under a tree to see the world around them. All three of the authors are experts in their areas.

'Introduction to Social Work' An Advocacy-based Profession gives students of Social work and the Human services a very good introduction to this profession and how it relates to other fields like counseling, nursing and education and other fields as the military and law. The text covers the basics of the profession in general from the needed education from earning an Associate's degree and above to the various duties that a social worker will perform. The book then goes into how the history of social work effects the profession now.

The various areas that the text covers will give the social work student and teacher what each of them need to learn and use the facts and skills to be an appropriate social worker. The teacher can compare the text with how they were taught at the beginning of their journey. The areas that are covered in showing how to be an advocate for others are learning how to help others deal with the issues of poverty, education, mental health, family and child welfare to new chapters dealing with subjects of environmentalism, veterans' affairs and military social work and international social work.

Inside the textbook the photographs that were chosen were vivid and described the issues of the chapters. The other charts that ranged from various pie and bar graphs illustrated the statistics very well and explained what was wrote in the text. Throughout the text there were lightly shaded blocks of readings that are titled 'Time to Think'. These are ideas that give the student a chance to see how they will fit in this profession. There are also at the beginning of each chapter objectives that tell want is covered in the chapter followed by vignettes of working social workers in their areas. At the end of each chapter there is a summary followed by the terms that were covered in the chapter and then questions and exercises to give the social work student a chance to show and tell what they have learned. All the terms in the chapter are highlighted in blue for easier learning of how they are used in the job. The questions as well as the exercises will bring about discussions in and out of the classroom that can also help the students study for exams. There is also a glossary of terms with each word highlighted followed with a detailed definition.

This textbook is well-structured for each chapter is subdivided to cover a particular area or skill, as in the first chapter with the topic of becoming a generalist social worker and learning about how to progress from the various levels of degrees and what each can do to working as a social worker whether at the micro, mezzo or macro level of the field. The text does mention about how to deal with offensive language when it comes to working with other nationalities and ethnicities and how to better understand, as in the text it mentions that the race 'black' will be capitalized for there are Blacks that are not from Africa. Social workers must also be careful of using various forms of jargon technically and socially in and out of the office.

Other technical issues of the using this text is that the font or type (print) is on the small size, but still readable without too much stress on the eyes. There is also at the beginning of the text a section that gives the student social worker the EPAS competencies for each of the chapters that one must learn and apply throughout the book. This is a great textbook to introduce the career(s) of social work and human services.