I N T E R NAT I O NA L J O U R NA L O F SOCIAL WELFARE

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2007.00492.x Int J Soc Welfare 2007: 16: 349–357

ISSN 1369-6866

Social workers’ attitudes towards social welfare policy

Original Article Social Weiss-Gal workers’ & Gal attitudes towards social welfare policy xxx Blackwell Oxford, International IJSW © 1369-6866 Blackwell UK Publishing Publishing Journal of LtdSocial Ltd andWelfare the International Journal of Social Welfare 2007

Weiss-Gal I, Gal J. Social workers’ attitudes towards social welfare policy Int J Soc Welfare 2007: 16: 349–357 © 2007 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. As social workers are widely called upon to take an active role in influencing social welfare policy, a better understanding of their views on the welfare state is crucial. This study examines the attitudes of 422 Israeli social workers from diverse social welfare agencies regarding social welfare policy. The framework for understanding these attitudes includes the notions of professionalisation processes, social work values, and the class position of social workers. The study’s findings indicate that support for the welfare state is quite moderate and these reflect more the class affiliation of social workers than their professional values and the professionalisation process.

Introduction Social workers are widely called upon to take an active role in influencing social welfare policy. Such calls are implicit in various definitions of the profession (Council on Social Work Education, 2001, section B4.1.2; Hare, 2004), more explicit in the professional codes of ethics of the International Federation of Social Workers (2004) and of many countries [British Association of Social Workers (BASW), 1996; Israeli Association of Social Workers (ISASW), 1994; National Association of Social Workers (NASW), 1999], and sounded repeatedly in scholarly books and papers (Haynes & Mickelson, 2003; Haynes & White, 1999; Jansson, 1990, 1999; Lens & Gibelman, 2000; Schneider & Netting, 1999; Stuart, 1999; Weil, 1996; Wolk, Pray, Weismiller & Dempsey, 1996). Nonetheless, very little is known about social workers’ views on social welfare and the welfare state (Hendrickson & Axelson, 1985; Littrel & Diwan, 1998). The present study aims to fill this gap by examining social workers’ attitudes towards various aspects of social welfare policy. Diverse theories offer diverging predictions regarding the nature of social workers’ attitudes towards social policy. Broadly speaking, it may be suggested that social workers’ attitudes towards welfare policy and the welfare state may be predicted by the values of the social work profession, the professionalisation of social work and the class affiliation of the social workers. The values prediction draws a link between the social policy preferences of social workers and the values and mission of the social work profession.

Idit Weiss-Gal1, John Gal2 Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel-Aviv University Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University

1 2

Key words: social workers, attitudes, social welfare, class, professionalisation Idit Weiss-Gal, Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv 69978, POB 39040, Israel E-mail: [email protected] Accepted for publication August 17, 2006

The various codes of ethics of the profession (BASW, 1996; ISASW, 1994; IFSW, 2004; NASW, 1999) all emphasise social justice as a core professional value and urge social workers to promote social policies that would advance this value (Banks, 2001; Reamer, 1998). More specifically, they call upon social workers to support social policies to correct the deprivation, inequality, discrimination and oppression of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, and to equalise their access to social resources, services and opportunities. Either explicitly or implicitly, they view both society and government as responsible for social welfare, and call upon social workers to support the ideal of the welfare state in which the role of the market would be limited. Similar values infuse the scholarly literature in which writers variously urge a more equal redistribution of wealth, a stronger safety net and the provision of social benefits as a ‘right’, and call upon social workers to promote this vision and oppose welfare policies that run counter to these principles (Figueira-McDonough, 1993; Gibelman, 2000; Haynes & White, 1999; Iatridis, 1995; McInnis-Dittrich, 1994; Reisch, 2002; Van Soest, 1994; Wakefield, 1988). The values prediction is that the values of the profession would lead social workers to strongly support such things as government involvement in social welfare, redistribution of wealth through taxes and benefits and services, and policies that would increase the access of deprived groups to societies’ ‘goods’. This prediction gains some support from the findings of an empirical study of the social welfare policy preferences of social work master (MSW) students in the USA and BSW (Batchelor of

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social work), students in Israel (Weiss, Gal & Cnaan, 2005). The findings showed that graduating students expressed high support for policies consistent with the principles of the welfare state and that students who began their studies with only moderate support for the idea of government responsibility for social welfare expressed strong support at the end of their studies. These findings suggest that the values taught in the course of their social work education either preserved or strengthened the students’ support for the welfare state. The professionalisation prediction is based on ‘negative theories of professionalisation’ (Reeser & Epstein, 1990), and it runs counter to the values prediction. It maintains that processes of professionalisation, defined as a profession striving for professional recognition, prestige and authority, leads members of that profession to align themselves with the interests and views of the social, economic and government elites on whom the profession’s status and power depend. As a result, the theory holds, members of professionalising professions will be socially conservative, politically passive and support the status quo (Freidson, 1970; Larson, 1977). The social work profession, it is widely acknowledged, has strived for full professional standing throughout the 20th century and is still doing so. This process, scholars contend, undermined the profession’s concern with social justice and reform, and encouraged social workers to adopt the conservative and neo-liberal views of the dominant groups in society (Bisno, 1969; Gordon, 1998; Haynes & Mickelson, 2003; Specht & Courtney, 1994; Wagner & Cohen, 1978; Withorn, 1984). Applied to the present study, the professionalisation prediction would be that, given the professionalisation of social work, social workers will view welfare as detrimental, oppose redistribution of resources and favour only limited government involvement in social welfare. Some indirect support for the professionalisation theory may be gleaned from studies showing very little involvement by social workers from different countries in social action and reform (Gibelman & Schervish, 1997; Mendes, 2003; Teare & Sheafor, 1995; Weiss, 2001). In addition, according to studies by Littrel and Diwan (1998) and by Bullock (2004), BSW students and social workers in the USA expressed relatively high levels of support for workfare policies that have formed a major plank in the neo-conservative welfare discourse. Lastly, the class prediction is based on the fact that social workers are members of the middle class. Situating social workers in the middle class is based on the assumption that admission to the profession requires higher education and that the actual role of social workers in the labour market and social services provides members of the profession with a degree of autonomy and remuneration that firmly places them within the wide boundaries of this class group (Hendrickson & Axelson, 1985; Walz & Groze, 1991). It claims that their attitudes

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towards social policy and the welfare state will reflect the values, attitudes and interests of this class. Exactly what these attitudes and interests are is under dispute (Ervasti, 2001; Forma, 2002). Scholars who advance what has been termed the ‘irreversibility’ thesis (Ervasti, 2001) argue that the welfare state’s longevity in the face of fierce critics is due to the fact that it not only serves the poor but also benefits the middle class. Members of this class receive extensive benefits from the welfare state and are employed in providing its services (Fujimura, 2000; Goodin & LeGrand, 1987; Pierson, 1996; Robson, 1976; Rothstein, 1998). As such, they have a vested self-interest in preserving the welfare state, especially its universal benefits, from which they themselves gain and in the service of which they are employed (Ervasti & Kangas, 1995; Forma, 1997; Korpi & Palme, 1998; Rosenthal, 1993). Applied to social workers, the ‘irreversibility’ thesis would predict that they would support the welfare state but favour universal benefits and those services which offer them employment opportunities over those specifically targeted on the poor and deprived. Some support for the first part of the prediction might be gleaned from a study by Hendrickson and Axelson (1985) which focused on three groups of middle-class professionals: computer scientists, public defenders and social workers. Their findings showed that the majority of all three middleclass groups viewed the government as responsible for improving the lot of the poor, supported increasing taxes on the wealthy to assist the poor and favoured guaranteed state support for universal healthcare. Similarly, an analysis of data from the General Social Surveys by Hodge (2003) appears to indicate that the views of social workers on a wide spectrum of issues, among them funding on welfare, do reflect their membership in what has been described as ‘the new class’. In contrast, scholars who advance what has been termed the ‘saturation’ (Ervasti, 2001) or ‘erosion of support’ thesis (Forma, 2002) contend that the increasing affluence and education of the middle class is leading them to abandon their traditional support for the welfare state with the notion of collective responsibility that it entails. This is because their affluence and education have fostered more individualistic attitudes, raised their expectations for high quality services that the welfare state cannot provide and have led to dissatisfaction and disillusion with the welfare state and an unwillingness to finance social welfare for the weak and deprived (Coughlin & Nordlund, 1996; Walker, 1984; Wilensky, 1975). This thesis, like the professionalisation theory, would expect social workers to be critical of the welfare state and unwilling to finance it. However, to our knowledge, no study among social work professionals or students indicates that social workers are critical of welfare expenditures or oppose the idea of government responsibility for welfare.

© 2007 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

Social workers’ attitudes towards social welfare policy

In fact, as can be gathered from this survey, very few studies have been carried out on social workers’ attitudes towards welfare policy and the welfare state. There is thus little or no solid empirical evidence that would favour one theory or set of predictions over the other. The present study examines the attitudes of social workers in Israel towards various aspects of social policy and the welfare state. More specifically, it examines social workers’ attitudes on six issues: (i) government spending on various areas of expenditure; (ii) the tradeoff between taxes and spending on social services; (iii) government responsibility for welfare; (iv) claimed negative repercussions of welfare benefits; (v) personal readiness to finance the welfare state; and (vi) meanstested versus universal benefits. The link between these attitudes and a number of socio-demographic (age, marital status) or professional features (social work degree, years of social work experience) will also be examined. This article examines social workers as a single group. To obtain an accurate picture of the stance of the profession, the analyses are conducted on a nearly representative sample of members of the profession in Israel. While the association between the attitudes of social workers and specific socio-demographic (gender, ethnic minority and religiosity) characteristics or modes of employment (e.g. government versus private sector) is, of course, an important avenue for research, constraints of space and differences in methodological approach prevent their inclusion in this article.

Method Sample The study participants were 422 social workers from 27 social service organisations in Israel. Initially, the participants numbered 482, but 60 were removed from the sample due to missing data. The participants were drawn from three sectors – the local and national government welfare services, the voluntary sector and the for-profit sector – in proportion to their national distribution in Israel. Thus, 78 per cent were from the municipal or government welfare services, 16 per cent from the voluntary sector and 6 per cent from the forprofit sector. This distribution is similar to that of social workers in Israel (Bar-Zuri, 2004). In each sector, social workers were sampled from all of Israel’s geographic areas (central, north, south) and from a variety of agencies that serve different client groups and deal with different problems. Thus, from the government welfare services, social workers were drawn from the municipal welfare departments, the youth and adult probation services, government hospitals, special schools and others. From the voluntary sector, workers were sampled from social change organisations, social service organisations and private non-profit hospitals.

From the for-profit sector, workers were sampled from a private agency that provides nursing services. The social workers taking part in the survey included both administrators and case-workers. The respondents included both Jews and Arabs. While in some cases members of each of these ethnic groups served solely clients of their own ethnic group (in the case of municipal welfare departments), in other cases (e.g. probation officers) the clients were of diverse ethnic origins. The study questionnaires were distributed to all the social workers in each organisation we sampled. The study participants are those social workers who completed the questionnaires. Response rates in the different organisations ranged from 40 to 90 per cent. The overall response rate was 65 per cent. Table 1 presents the sociodemographic and professional features of the sample, as well as available comparable data on the overall social worker population in Israel (Bar-Zuri, 2004). As can be seen, the great majority of the participants were women (86 per cent), married (66 per cent), Jewish (88 per cent) and secular (67 per cent). The gender distribution was similar to that in the overall social worker population in Israel. Somewhat more of the sample was married than in the overall population of social workers. The proportion of Jews was smaller and that of Arabs three times that of their representation in the profession. The participants’ ages ranged from 22– 66, with a mean of 37.5 [standard deviation (SD) = 9.74], which is similar to the mean age in the profession. With regard to their professional features, about twothirds of the study participants (68 per cent) had a BSW (which allows them to work in the profession in Israel), the remainder an MSW or PhD (32 per cent). Data are not available on the distribution of education among social workers in Israel. However, the distribution in our sample is consistent with the mean education of social workers in Israel, which is 16.9 years. More than half of the study participants were employed full-time (58 per cent), around a third at least half-time and only around 10 per cent less than half-time. This distribution, too, is not dissimilar to that in the profession. Their years of employment in the profession ranged from one to 42 (M (mean) = 10.72; SD = 8.31). Lastly, only 7 per cent of the participants had a private practice in addition to their employment in a social service agency.

Measures The social workers were asked their opinions on a variety of matters concerning government welfare policy.

Desired levels of government spending. This was assessed using a question from a questionnaire developed by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) to measure attitudes towards the role of government (http://www.issp.org/data.htm – Role of Government III).

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Weiss-Gal & Gal Table 1. Demographic and professional characteristics of the sample (n = 422). Variable

Values

n

Per cent

Per cent of social workers in Israel (Bar-Zuri, 2004)

Gender

Female Male Married Unmarried Jew Arab Secular Traditional Orthodox BSW MSW 50 51–99 100 (full time) 0–2 3–5 6–10 11–15 over 16 Not at all In addition

363 55 319 99 370 48 277 82 54 282 135 40 124 223 24 112 108 66 98 393 29 M = 37.5 SD = 9.74

86 14 76 24 88 12 67 20 13 68 32 10 32 58 7 27 26 16 24 93 7

89 11 66 34 95.7 4.3 – – – – – – – 66 – – – – – – – M = 40.2

Marital status Nationality Religiosity

Social work degree Per cent of employment

Years of employment in social work

Private practice Age

Note: With regard to some of the variables, the totals may not equal the specified n due to missing data. M, mean; SD, standard deviation.

The question was, ‘Listed below are various areas of government spending. Please show whether you would like to see more or less government spending in each area. Remember that if you say “much more” it might require a tax increase to pay for it’. The eight areas listed were: health, education, social security pensions, the environment, the military and defence, police and law enforcement, unemployment benefits, culture and the arts. For the purpose of this study, three areas of social welfare were added: personal social services, housing and immigrant absorption. For each item, the study participants were asked to respond on a 5-point Likert scale, with 1 = much less and 5 = much more.

Favoured social welfare expenditures relative to tax and budget considerations. This was assessed using two questions, developed for the same ISSP questionnaire noted above. The first question was: ‘If the government had a choice between reducing taxes (all taxes, including income tax, sales tax and the rest) or spending more on social welfare programmes, which do you think it should do? (A) Reduce taxes, even if this means spending less on social programmes; (B) Spend more on social programmes even if this means higher taxes; (C) Cannot choose’. The second question was: ‘Assuming the level of taxation in Israel stays the same as it is now, should the government: (A) Spend the same amount as now on social welfare programmes, even if this means that the national debt or deficit remains as

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it is; (B) Spend less on social programmes, so that the national debt or deficit can be reduced; (C) Cannot choose’.

Support for the welfare state. This variable was examined by using a 15-item questionnaire developed by the authors for the purpose of this study. The questionnaire examines the social workers’ support for government responsibility for social welfare, their readiness to pay for welfare expenditures and their views on the possible disadvantages of welfare payments for their recipients. For each item, respondents were asked to rate their degree of agreement on a 5-point Likert scale, with 1 = do not agree and 5 = strongly agree. The first draft of this questionnaire was constructed on the basis of a questionnaire developed for previous studies (Weiss et al., 2005; Weiss, Gal, Cnaan & Majlaglic, 2002). To increase the internal consistency of that questionnaire, some items were removed, some rephrased and some added. Three researchers on social welfare policy in Israel were then asked to review the revised questionnaire with an eye to whether or not it adequately examined support for the welfare state. Further revisions were made in the wake of their comments. The new version was then tested in a pilot study among 45 MSW students and 48 economics students in their last year of undergraduate study. Although the subsequent factor analysis indicated high content validity, a few small changes in phrasing were made before the administration of the questionnaire to the study participants.

© 2007 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

Social workers’ attitudes towards social welfare policy Table 2. Factor loadings of the three factors in the questionnaire on support for the welfare state. The item (abridged version)

Factor 1

Factor 2

0.87 0.84 0.82 0.80 0.78

0.11 0.06 0.02 0.05 0.13

0.14 0.16 0.17 0.03 0.14

Factor 2: readiness to pay for the welfare state Readiness to pay higher taxes so as to increase spending on education Readiness to pay higher taxes so as to increase spending on social welfare Readiness to pay higher health taxes so as to increase spending on health Readiness to pay higher taxes so as to increase spending on housing Readiness to pay higher social security payments so as to increase benefits

−0.06 0.14 −0.03 0.10 0.25

0.82 0.80 0.76 0.74 0.72

0.02 0.13 0.06 0.15 0.12

Factor 3: government responsibility for social welfare The government should guarantee that no one should suffer from severe deprivation The government should guarantee a basic standard of living The government should take responsibility for the welfare of people unable to meet their own needs The government should guarantee employment for all The government should take responsibility for reducing income gaps

0.19 0.13 0.15 −0.03 0.14

0.07 0.06 0.13 −0.07 0.20

0.79 0.70 0.69 0.54 0.53

0.89

0.83

0.66

Factor 1: negative effects of benefits on their recipients Welfare encourages laziness Welfare benefits undermine individual responsibility Benefits for the poor undermine their willingness to work Benefits for poor families increase their dependence Unemployment compensations undermine the willingness of the unemployed to work

Cronbach’s alpha

Principal components factor analysis of the responses in the present study yielded three factors with eigenvalues greater than 1. These factors jointly explained 59 per cent of the variance. The factor loadings are presented in Table 2. As can be seen, the first five items loaded high on the first factor, the second five items high on the second factor and the last five items high on the third factor. The first factor can be termed ‘negative effects of welfare payments on their recipients’; the second, ‘readiness to pay for the welfare state’; and the third, ‘government responsibility for welfare’. The internal consistencies of the first two factors were high, that of the third factor lower but acceptable. The internal consistency of the scale as a whole was high: α = 0.84. Each participant received three scores in accord with the mean of his or her responses on the items in each factor. So that the scores would all have the same directionality, the items in the first factor were reversed and the factor was renamed ‘opposition to the view that welfare payments have negative effects’. The higher the scores, the greater was the participant’s support for the welfare state.

Support for universal welfare benefits. This variable was examined using a seven-item questionnaire developed for the purpose of the study. The procedure used to develop this questionnaire was the same as that used to develop the questionnaire examining the participants’ support for the welfare state. Of the seven items, four refer to support for universal benefits (e.g. ‘All families with children should receive child allowances, whatever their income’); three refer to support for selective benefits (e.g., ‘Old age pensions should be given only

Factor 3

to elderly persons who are poor’). The participants were asked to indicate their agreement with each statement on a 5-point Likert scale, with 1 = disagree and 5 = strongly agree. Internal consistency was high: α = 0.85. Scores were calculated as the mean of each participant’s ratings on the seven items, after the scaling of the three items that tapped support for selective benefits was reversed. Thus, higher scores meant greater support for universal benefits.

Procedure The questionnaires were distributed to the social workers between June and December 2004. The questionnaires were distributed prior to a lecture that the first researcher delivered to social workers employed in eight of the 27 social service agencies in the study. The lecture was delivered after the researcher approached the head of the service with an offer to address the social workers on a subject of interest to them (e.g., critical theories in social work, the Israeli welfare state) in exchange for the workers filling out the questionnaires. In two instances, heads of services requested the lectures on their own. To avoid biasing the responses, the questionnaires were filled out before the lecture. In social services in which meetings of all the staff were not held, the questionnaires were placed in the social workers’ mailboxes. In these cases, the social workers filled out the questionnaire at a time of their own choosing. A letter explaining the purpose and importance of the study and guaranteeing anonymity accompanied the questionnaires. Questionnaires to be filled out before the lecture were accompanied by a blank envelope, and upon completion placed in a cardboard box in the room

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where the lecture was delivered. Those to be filled out at a time of the respondents’ choosing were accompanied by a self-addressed envelope and either mailed to the researcher directly or given to the secretary, from whom the sealed envelopes were collected. No differences were found in the mean scores of the attitudes towards the welfare state as surveyed according to either of the two methods.

Results Favoured government expenditures The means and standard deviations of the social workers’ responses to the first study question are presented in Table 3. As can be seen from the findings on the mean scores and on the results of the distribution on responses to the various spending areas presented in the table, the participants favoured increasing expenditures on eight of the eleven items, with higher increases favoured for (in descending order): education, health, personal social services, social security pensions. Not surprisingly, a large majority of respondents expressed a desire for the government to spend more or much more in these areas. There was less support for increased spending on environment, police and law enforcement, culture and art, and housing, with the proportion of social workers expressing a desire for more or much more funding for these areas ranging from 40 to 60 per cent of respondents. In contrast to these areas, slight decreases were favoured by respondents for immigrant absorption, unemployment benefits and military and defence spending, with only16 to 23 per cent of the social workers supporting more or much more spending. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures showed a large significant difference in the various areas [F(10, 4210) = 259.03; p < 0.001; η2 = 0.38]. A Newman Kuel’s paired comparison test

showed significant differences between education and all the other items; between health and all the others; between personal social services and social security benefits and all the others; between culture and art, and housing and all the others; and between immigrant absorption, unemployment benefits and military and defence spending and all the others. Also examined was whether social workers’ spending preferences were associated with their age, marital status, social work degree or years of professional experience. Pearson correlations carried out between spending preferences and age and years of professional experience showed significant, though weak, correlations between age and spending preferences on the environment (r = 0.18, p < 0.001), police and law enforcement (r = 0.17, p < 0.01) and social security benefits (r = 0.18, p < 0.001). The older the respondents, the more they favoured spending on these items. No significant correlations were found between spending preferences and professional experience. One-way ANOVAs did not yield significant differences in spending preferences between married and unmarried social workers or between social workers with a BSW and those with an MSW or PhD.

Favoured social welfare expenditures relative to tax and budget considerations With regard to the first question, which asked the respondents to choose between reducing taxes and spending more on social welfare programmes, 52.4 per cent favoured increased government spending on social welfare programmes even if this meant higher taxes; 23.2 per cent favoured cutting taxes even if this meant reducing social welfare programmes; and 24.4 per cent could not decide. With regard to the second question, which assumed that tax levels would not be changed, 72 per cent of the respondents favoured keeping government expenditures on social welfare at the

Table 3. Government spending: distributions, means and standard deviations (n = 422). Area

M

SD

Much less + less Per cent

As is Per cent

More + much more Per cent

Education Health Personal social services Social security pensions Environment Police and criminal justice Arts and culture Housing Immigration Unemployment benefits Military and defence

4.51 4.17 3.97 3.96 3.70 3.62 3.40 3.32 2.86 2.81 2.74

0.64 0.65 0.74 0.68 0.75 0.86 0.78 0.83 0.98 0.91 0.95

0.5 0.7 3.8 0.5 2.8 7.8 8.0 13.5 29.9 34.8 36.0

5.9 11.8 17.5 23.7 37.2 36.7 49.3 46.7 47.4 46.2 47.9

93.6 87.5 78.7 75.8 60.0 55.5 42.7 39.8 22.7 19.0 16.1

M, mean; SD, standard deviation.

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Social workers’ attitudes towards social welfare policy

current level, 9 per cent favoured reducing the expenditures in order to reduce the national debt or deficit, and 19 per cent could not decide. Chi square analyses carried out to determine whether the responses to the two questions differed in accord with the workers’ age, marital status, degree or professional experience showed no significant differences.

Support for the welfare state and for universal welfare benefits With regard to support for the welfare state, the mean scores were as follows: opposition to the view that welfare payments have negative effect: M = 3.12 (SD = 0.97); readiness to pay for the welfare state: M = 2.45 (SD = 0.91); and government responsibility for welfare: M = 3.98 (SD = 0.68). With regard to support for universal welfare benefits, the mean support was M = 3.20 (SD = 0.86). No statistically significant correlations were found with age and years of social work experience, nor were significant differences found between social workers according to marital status and academic degree in social work.

Discussion Overall, the study’s findings indicate that Israeli social workers support the welfare state. These findings are similar to those found in the Hendrickson and Axelson (1985) study of social workers and members of other middle-class professional groups in the USA. The social workers in Israel favoured larger increases in spending on education, health, pensions and personal social services than on non-social items such as the environment, police and law enforcement, and culture and art. They also favoured decreased spending on the military and defence. In other words, in the trade-off between defence and social welfare, they favoured social welfare. Moreover, slightly more than half of the social workers favoured increasing government spending on social welfare over cutting taxes, and almost threequarters of them favoured maintaining at least the current level of spending over reducing the national debt or deficit. Lastly, they tended to hold the government responsible for social welfare. Their support is quite moderate, however. Support for universal social benefits reached only the midpoint of the measuring scale, as did opposition to the view that welfare benefits harm their recipients. Social workers’ readiness to pay for the welfare state was even less than this. Moreover, about a quarter of the respondents favoured cutting taxes even if this meant reducing social welfare programmes. Given that support for the welfare state among the general public in Israel is high and even greater than that in other welfare states (Kop, 2004; Oren & Lewin-

Epstein, 2000; Shalev, 2003), the views expressed by social workers in this study are not particularly unique in their degree of support for the welfare state. Thus, for example, as was the case for the social workers surveyed in this study, a vast majority of the respondents in Israel prefers increased state spending for health and education over defence (Shalev, 2003). With regard to the predictors outlined in the Introduction, the support expressed by the social workers was too high to be explained either by the ‘professionalisation’ theory or the ‘saturation’ or ‘erosion of support’ thesis of the ‘class theory’. On the other hand, their support for the welfare state is too lukewarm to be explained by the ‘social work values theory’, which would predict more enthusiastic support for all social welfare items as well as for services for vulnerable and disadvantaged populations. In fact, it can be argued that their lukewarm support is inconsistent with the expectations central to the profession that social workers take an active role in promoting social justice. It may be noted in this connection that social workers in Israel have mounted only very limited opposition to the draconian budgetary constraints on social welfare spending that have been imposed in Israel in the last few years or to the neo-liberal economic policies that underpin the cuts in social spending (Doron, 2002). One wonders how much the moderate nature of their support for the welfare state explains the weakness of their opposition. Of the three possible predictors outlined in the Introduction, the study’s findings are most consistent with the ‘irreversibility’ thesis of the ‘class’ predictor, which maintains that members of the middle classes would support the welfare state in order to continue receiving the many benefits that they themselves derive from it, both as recipients and employees. The findings show that the social workers surveyed here favoured greater government expenditures on services and benefits that they would gain from than on benefits for more needy groups. More specifically, they favoured the greatest increase in government expenditures on education, health, personal social services and social security pensions, and no increase or reduced expenditures for housing, immigrant absorption and unemployment benefits. Education, healthcare and social security pensions are universal services or benefits in Israel, to which all are entitled whatever their income level. Housing benefits are means-tested, while immigrant absorption and unemployment benefits are earmarked for particular groups to which the social workers do not see themselves as belonging. The respondents’ support for personal social services, which are channelled mainly into poor and vulnerable groups (e.g., single mothers, children at risk, families living in poverty, the elderly, juvenile delinquents and adult criminals, terror victims etc.), only appear inconsistent with this pattern at first glance. As municipal social welfare departments and national

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government agencies provide the bulk of the personal social services in Israel, these are primary sources of employment for social workers in the country and as such there is ample reason for social workers to support funding for these services. All in all, the findings seem to suggest that the attitudes of social workers in Israel towards social policy reflect their social position in the middle class more than their professional values. This conclusion, however, must be regarded as tentative as it is based solely on a survey of the views of social workers and does not compare these to the attitudes of other middle-class professionals. In addition, the study sample was not random and therefore cannot claim to be necessarily representative of the entire social work population in Israel. This inevitably raises questions of to what extent the attitudes of the respondents in the sample are representative of those of the profession as a whole. Despite this limitation, the sample size was relatively large and, as the discussion in the sample section indicated, its distribution according to sectors of the social work economy as well as its professional, educational, geographical, national and gender composition is generally similar to that of the profession in Israel. Obviously, further study is required to confirm, modify or refute this conclusion. For example, it is important to ask the social workers not only what expenditures and trade-offs they favour, but also why. It is also important to compare social workers’ policy preferences with those of other human services professionals (e.g., psychologists, nurses, teachers) who also tend to belong to the middle class. Lastly, it is important to carry out similar studies in other countries and compare the findings. Nonetheless, the study sheds light on an important but little explored area in social work. As noted in the Introduction, there is very little empirical study to date of social workers’ attitudes towards social welfare policy and the welfare state. Moreover, the findings suggest that if social workers are to fulfil the mission of the profession, their commitment to the idea of the welfare state must be strengthened and reinforced. This is an endeavour in which both schools of social work and professional organisations must take part.

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