An Exploratory Study on the Challenges Faced by Social Workers Working with Transnational Families in Singapore
March 21, 2023
World Social Work Day is commemorated on 21st March 2023, or the third Tuesday of March each year. It is the key day in the social work calendar where social workers globally celebrate and promote their profession. Social workers everywhere—including in Singapore—do good work in providing social services to individuals, families, and societies, advocating for social justice and human rights in the process.
‘An Exploratory Study on The Challenges Faced by Social Workers Working with Transnational Families in Singapore’ (International Social Work, 2022) by Ms Elaine Tan and Associate Professor Hyekyung Choo (both from NUS Social Work) is one such contribution to social work knowledge and practice. The piece was adapted from Ms Tan’s undergraduate thesis. Noting that trends in Singapore’s demography seem to lean towards the increase of transnational families in the country, the article focuses on social work with non-citizen women married to working-class local men. It examines the challenges faced by Singapore social workers in working with transnational families and the strategies adopted by social workers to overcome these challenges through semi-structured interviews with social workers from Family Service Centres.
The authors identify systemic, cultural, and moral challenges as difficulties facing social workers working with transnational families. Systemic challenges refer to those navigating the legal and bureaucratic systems of national authorities. Within this, the inaccessibility of regulatory and policy information and the differences in the documentation style of social workers and public bureaucracy are particularly salient issues social workers face.
Cultural challenges include language barriers, especially when foreign spouses do not speak English or Mandarin. Differences in cultural values, such as those relating to marriage, gender roles, and children’s education, can pose a challenge for social workers when helping clients navigate their legal and normative rights and obligations in Singapore.
A moral challenge highlighted is social workers’ personal bias against local spouses. As foreign spouses are often dependent on local spouses for a host of legal and economic reasons, local spouses can often make it more challenging for social workers to help their clients. Nonetheless, social workers are aware of the need to maintain value neutrality and hence grapple with viewing local spouses neutrally in challenging situations.
To cope with these challenges, the authors found that social workers in Singapore rely largely on colleagues for support, particularly those with more experience. Colleagues help by sharing their knowledge and experiences, thereby introducing social workers to new perspectives or methods which can improve their capabilities to help their clients. This includes knowledge on navigating through state bureaucracy and tapping on new resources. Supervision by senior colleagues also helps with keeping personal bias in check.
Other strategies include finding alternate communication means, including computerised translation services like Google Translate, to overcome language barriers. Social workers also report attempting to learn about cross-national laws, as well as the language and cultures of their clients. This helps the social worker to understand their clients better. This sense of familiarity also helps to build rapport, which allows the social worker-client relationship to transcend the mere provision of social goods.
Read the full article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00208728211073935