Organizational and environmental determinants of comprehensiveness in macro social work education

This study examined the current status of the macro social work curriculum in graduate schools of social work and looked at the factors that were related to more comprehensive curricula. The research was basically a cross-sectional survey study, but existing statistics and content analysis of syllabi were also used. Nearly 75% of the schools with a macro concentration responded to the study. The major descriptive findings were that (1) there was a considerable amount of diversity in the curricula across schools, (2) most schools had a mixture of macro methods, (3) social administration was making a place for itself in the curriculum, but technical areas (finance and personnel) were given insufficient attention, (4) community practice was still a significant part of the macro curriculum and was largely represented by a social planning emphasis, (5) policy practice is a new area that has yet to make a major impact on the macro curriculum, and (6) while there is considerable discussion about integrated macro methods, this is not found in the curricula of many schools. The evaluation of factors that give rise to comprehensiveness was conducted in three phases. Zero order correlations were generated to assess the overall relationship between comprehensiveness and the predictor variables. The second step involved creating program types with a combination of principle components analysis and cluster analysis using Ward's Method. Four program types were generated from the cluster solution. Discriminant analysis was then used to relate the clusters to the predictor variables in the final step. Results suggested that program enrollment/ internal and external service, presence of a macro dean and publication productivity were the factors that were most useful for predicting comprehensiveness. This suggests a bounded or limited rationality model.