Political commitment has been a specific attitude of Italian social work from this beginning to the 70s, but what is now the situation? Is only a memory of the past or there is a truly political engagement in the social workers activity?
The paper will present the results of a pilot quantitative research that has been conducted in two Italian regions: Lombardia and Sicily.
Using the same questionnaire that has been created by Israelian researchers (Gal, Weiss-Gal, 2013) through a snowballing sample, 71 social workers employed in social services of municipalities have been interviewed.
The results confirm a general impression that social workers are now much more oriented to work with individual problems, instead to engage themselves in collective actions towards the community, as it was also found in a previous research (Facchini, 2010) . Some significant differences between social workers with few or many years of carrier , orient also to consider the relationship between the motivation of the new generations of students that are enrolled in social work education, their distrust in the politics and public institutions (Facchini, Campanini, 2014) and the very poor activities oriented to policy practice.
In the presentation some of the more interesting results will be analysed, as well as some correlations between the findings of this questionnaire and the outcomes of previous researches conducted in Italy on social work profession ad student motivations
Bibliography
Weiss Gal I., Gal J.(2013) (eds.),Social Workers Affecting Social Policy: An International Perspective, The policy Press, Bristol
Facchini C.(2010) (ed.), Tra impegno e professione. Gli assistenti sociali come soggetti del welfare, Il Mulino, Bologna
Campanini A., Facchini C.(2013), Values and motivations in BA students of social work: the italian case, Social work & Society,vol.11, n.1 in www.socwork.net
Research and evaluation of social work practice and service delivery, including organizati
