Lia Levin

Tel Aviv University | TAU · School of Social Work

The factors that inhibit and promote professional interventions with young adults refer to social, formal-structural, and personal factors. Nevertheless, studies of these factors from social workers’ perspective, and research of the inhibitors associated with the socio-cultural context of minority young adults, are few. The aim of the present study...

The aim of the study was to understand structural and socio-political barriers faced by social workers to providing services to Arab-Palestinian young women abused in childhood, considering their multiple marginalisation. The literature has addressed the structural barriers in terms of the written policy and the social services provided to the Arab...

Inspectors are the executing branch of state regulation. Existing literature focuses on their tasks and operations, mostly with regard to their commitments to the state and their complex relations with inspectees. The present study explores a heretofore-unexamined issue: the playing out of inspection in a sociopolitical context of national conflict...

The present study is focused on understanding how the image of the girl designated “in distress” in official regulations guiding the provision of public social services to girls in Israel can be structured. The study takes a qualitative approach, and employs the critical-feminist paradigm to the analysis and interpretation of discourse, combining t...

Currently, it is possible to observe a slowly (but surely) growing volume of claims seeking to disprove Foucauldian ideas about knowledge and power as overlapping basic theories of epistemic justice. Prompted by these claims, alongside adopting tenets of Critical Race Theory to address injustices inflicted upon people facing mental health challenge...

This article addresses references to people’s natural environments in some of the central declarative statements that shape social work worldwide. Four types of documents were analyzed, including statements associated with the Global Definition of Social Work, the Global Standards for Social Work Education and Training, the Global Social Work State...

The non-take-up of rights among social service-users is a well-known phenomenon, with grave implications. In response to it, social workers holding various roles are tasked with assisting service-users in obtaining their rights, in accordance with national policies and professional ethics. Despite its importance, research examining factors possibly...

While scholars have examined how neoliberal ideas and policies manifest at the front lines of the welfare state, far less is known about how the neoliberal approach prevalent in such states shapes decisions that senior state actors make about social welfare policy. The current study advances the literature by examining the processes and motivations...

Recent years have seen a rapidly growing trend of outsourcing elements of public participation from public institutions to external citizen engagement consultants. This study examined this phenomenon using the theoretical framework of epistemic in/justice. It is based on a sequential deductive‐inductive analysis of interviews with public administra...

This study offers insight into the moral deliberations of public sector community workers (PCWs), who operate in the super-diverse neighborhoods of South Tel Aviv, which are home to similar numbers of citizen and asylum-seeker residents. Two questions were central to our examination: How do PCWs decide which populations and residents constitute the...

Service-users' inclusion (SUI) in decision-making regarding services provided by public social services has numerous benefits for both users and providers. However, studies show a gap between the evolution of inclusive discourse and policy, and the implementation of SUI in social services’ daily practice. Focusing on the organisational context, the...

The conceptual and theoretical development of the concept of sustainable welfare in recent years, reflecting the need for eco-social welfare policies that are adapted to non-linear changes in eco-social reality. Transformations that are eco-social by core, involve multidimensional aspects of human welfare, the thriving of communities, and the resil...

This study examined the associations between social workers' professional identity and the quality of their work, as reflected by their perceived job performance and sense of personal accomplishment. Based on literature attesting to the contribution of the working alliance between social workers and their service-users to the attainment of interven...

In this article, we report findings pertaining to connections between social workers’ exposure to daily stressors, the work benefits they receive, their levels of burnout and their well-being. We examined (i) the associations between social workers’ perceived exposure to daily stressors and their well-being; (ii) the mediating effect of burnout on...

Consumer involvement and service transparency have, in recent years, become inherent components of policy guiding the provision of public mental health and social care services. The current study wished to deepen insights on these issues, as they unfold in public services reforms in Israel and England, through an examination of key policy documents...

Values play a crucial role in the credo of social work. Recent definitions of the profession delineate the values that should guide social work worldwide. At the same time, social workers’ employment patterns and changes in the traditional welfare state have resulted in fragmentations in the profession, highlighting the importance of shared profess...

In recent years, many western welfare states have undergone reforms in their social services. These reforms are intended to influence the work of social workers in the public sector, and depend largely upon workers' ability and willingness to implement them. The research presented in this article addresses the reform in Israeli Departments of Socia...

The current study was designed in order to carry out a novel analysis of recent research efforts and to examine the inner balance within the academic corpus of knowledge on child maltreatment. Of 825 papers published in the field of child maltreatment between the years 2010–2015, 104 were randomly selected for critical review using a Facet Theory f...

Social justice’s special relationship with the social work profession has recently been confirmed by new definitions of social good that identify the promotion of social justice as a primary goal of social work research and practice. This contemporary use of the ideas and ideals of social justice creates an opportunity to reexamine it in the contex...

Despite critical social work’s (CSW) growing popularity, its praxes and associated policies have thus far remained largely discursive. This situation can be attributed to several factors, including social workers’ attitudes, training, and education and the nature of the systems and organizations employing them. In this article, we contend that besi...

Although social workers' engagement in policy-shaping processes to advance social justice reflects this obligation of the social work profession, many social workers avoid implementing policy practice (PP). Previous studies have identified several barriers limiting social workers' use of this practice. However, how such barriers can be overcome rem...

Unemployment is a harsh social phenomenon with far reaching negative implications. Unemployed individuals often seek assistance from social workers working in Municipal Departments of Social Services around the world. However, little to no research exists on the factors involved in social workers’ choice to engage in employment‐promoting practices...

This study examined various organizational, environmental, and professional components of therapeutic communities in Israel and their relationship with patient retention rates. Key elements included the juxtaposition between objective and subjective components of social environments, as reflected in the perceptions of staff (mostly social workers)...

Objective: Partnerships between service users and social workers are complex in nature and can be driven by both personal and contextual circumstances. This study sought to explore the relationship between social workers' involvement in shared decision making with service users, their attitudes towards service users in poverty, moral standards and...

Over the past decades, social policies in Israel have been characterised by a growing trend towards involving social service clients in decision-making processes. Drawing on interviews with seventy-seven social workers from various backgrounds employed in a range of organisations and positions, the current study sought to illuminate the contested n...

Shared decision-making (SDM), a representation of shared knowledge and power between social workers and their clients, is gaining popularity and prevalence in social services around the world. In many senses, SDM reflects values traditionally associated with social work and service provision, such as equality and anti-discrimination. In the complex...

This paper seeks to further discourse concerning the implications of critical social work for direct practice with families and children. It presents and discusses a hypothetical example of how a social worker in a social care agency in Israel can incorporate critical social work notions into an official social work report. The paper begins by pres...

Client collaboration has long since been a core principle in social work practice. Despite its wide reference in the profession's practical and theoretical discourse, no single, clearly delineated definition of it can be found in the literature. This article presents a proposed framework for defining and assessing client collaboration, which rests...

The study examines the association between the financial and employment status of 71 Israeli couples in the process of divorce and their co-parenting, as measured by participation in their children’s lives, communication about their children, consideration for the other parent’s childcare needs, and inter-spousal tension and hostility. Its findings...

Social workers' involvement in policy practice is often described as limited, despite social work's ecological and holistic view of social problems. One explanation for this could be social workers' perception of policy-directed practices as unfeasibly implemented within the framework of their daily actions and existing professional knowledge. This...

Contemporary developments in social attitudes toward prostitution and prostitutes influence both social policies and the social work profession. Understanding individuals’ attitudes toward these issues is necessary for the development of social interventions and policies aimed at reducing stigmata attached to them. This article describes a new rese...

This article aims to enrich the current limited body of knowledge regarding social work professional discourse. More specifically, it seeks to examine the extent and ways in which the social work intra-profession discourse, as it is manifested in formal job descriptions of social workers in Israel, reflects the commitment to working with people liv...

Contemporary developments in social attitudes toward prostitution and prostitutes influence both social policies and the social work profession. Understanding individuals' attitudes toward these issues is necessary for the development of social interventions and policies aimed at reducing stigmata attached to them. This article describes a new rese...

Social workers' involvement in the policy-making process (policy practice) is an important aspect of social work. This article examines formal social work job descriptions in an effort to determine whether, and to what extent, social workers in Israel are required to engage in policy practice and which specific activities are required of them in th...

The participatory approach is depicted as inherent to the social work profession in social workers' theoretical literature, codes of ethics and practical discourse. The current study examined whether, and to what degree, social workers in Israel are indeed formally required to engage in participatory practices in the job descriptions of diverse soc...

Preliminary investigations of disasters, including terrorism, have identified degree of exposure as a highly reliable predictor of trauma symptoms. However, this effect has not been consistently demonstrated in studies conducted in Israel. One explanation for this may be found in the different mechanisms that influence the relationship between expo...