The purpose of this study is to determine the level of human rights awareness with regards to social welfare practices, the primary subjects of which are those neglected by society, through the human rights awareness index developed by the National Hu...
The purpose of this study is to determine the level of human rights awareness with regards to social welfare practices, the primary subjects of which are those neglected by society, through the human rights awareness index developed by the National Human Rights Commission, and determine what kind of affects human rights awareness has on the advocacy of social welfare.
The subjects of this study were 300 social welfare workers who work in social welfare agencies located in the metropolitan cities of Busan and Daegu, of which 269 people answered the distributed surveys. Using SPSS 12.0/Win., I conducted a frequency analysis, an inspection on the diference between the two averages, a one-way ANOVA, a correlation analysis, and a regression analysis on the data gathered from those answered surveys.
In summary, the results of this study are as follows; In a nutshell, human rights awareness was found to affect advocacy of social welfare quite evenly in all aspects. In terms of the background variable, the personal attributes of individuals, the number of years of experience each social worker had with the agency, their education, or possession of credentials did not significantly affect those results. There was no difference between the licensed social welfare workers and the others. Social welfare has always supported and promoted the value of human rights, focused on human rights, and strived to conduct social welfare activities based on human rights. Therefore, the concept of human rights awareness must be developed to a more precise level that can be applied in specific and actual situations related to human rights.
The reason why I studied the human rights awareness levels of people working in social welfare agencies was to determine the relationship between those levels and the advocacy of social welfare, the ultimate purpose of discussions on human rights.
Based on the aforementioned results of the study, I propose the following.
First, I wish to point out that if nobody regards the human rights issues associated with the socially weak as problematic, that class will be even further neglected by society. So, in the field of practical social welfare, training courses to promote human rights awareness should be further developed. As a method to do so, I propose the establishment of a place for social participation training(a life-long learning center) to help social welfare workers become acting experts in their field.
Second, as specialists practicing the advocacy of social welfare, social welfare workers should be given a wider range of opportunities by social welfare agencies and training institutes specializing in social welfare to become experts in the field, by learning practical social welfare techniques and actively participating in social welfare movements.
Third, the interest in human rights is quite high amongst members of the field of social welfare.
This is a very desirable phenomenon, and various efforts to provide support to further the development of such interests should be made. An example of such efforts would be developing and supplying human rights training programs. In order to accommodate the demand for such training, I find that the constant interest and support of the Korea Academy of Social Welfare is absolutely necessary.
Finally, I believe that social welfare workers should strive to overcome the agency director and organization based radial structure and study and develop a client based social welfare advocacy structure based on their sense of duty. I also mention that this was a factor limiting this study.