Values Building in Social Work Education in Visegrad Countries: Integrated Approach

Abstract

Many key aspects of social work education are not sufficiently researched, and our knowledge of how students build values in social work education, despite its importance for creating concepts about values and their application in practice, is underexplored. The research aims to evaluate the perspective of social work students in the process of values building in social work education in Visegrad countries (V4 countries: Czech Republic (CZ), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), and Slovakia (SK)) and to determine the implementation for achieving and strengthening an integrated approach in this process. The research was carried out using a qualitative research strategy interviewing 86 students from 10 universities in V4 countries. The research results show that the V4 countries share some common threats to values building in social work education: contextual threats such as an increasing impact of neoliberalism and internal threats, such as a non-existent systemic concept of values building education.