A review on social work students' reading profile: Case of Yalova University

The act of reading has accompanied the human being's quest for knowledge since the invention of the writing. Today, as the most effective way of acquiring information, it also maintains the necessity for personal and professional development of the individual. Rapidly changing information has been added to the requirements of the rapidly changing world. Today, compared to the past, every field has to keep its knowledge up to date in this direction much more quickly. Social work is multidisciplinary in the sense that it is fed by many disciplines; it is also an interdisciplinary because of the information interaction between social work and other disciplines. The band between social work, which has multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature, and information is vital both in practice and theory. Keeping this information up to date and localizing it; feeding from domestic information has a positive impact on cultural competence and success in practice. A reading habit included in the field of social works can offer personal and professional development to the social worker. For this reason, reading activity stands as opportunity for the social work to have a solid foundation of knowledge and a professional and disciplined development of the field, and as an option that should not be missed. The first and primary objective of the study is that social work is a starting point for studies on knowledge-based work and to emphasize the field's knowledge base and interdisciplinary nature that the field needs. For this reason, it has been seen that students' reading preferences should be put forth and evaluated in this direction. In this study, the reading attitudes of the students of social work department of Yalova University were measured using questionnaire technique. the questionnaire, which was appropriate for screening model, was conducted with 147 students from social work department. The questionnaire was prepared by the researcher and consists of forty-four questions, six of which are demographic; nineteen are field related and the other nineteen are out of the field. It was aimed at identifying students' reading preferences related to social work and social sciences and general reading attitudes by field related and out-of-field questions respectively. According to the results of the research, most of the students prefer to read translated Works in the field. Although reading in the field is seen as an option for proficiency, there is not an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary reading habit required by the field. It has been observed that female participants have a high level of reading in psychology and men in the field of social policy. Female participants constitute the majority in terms of field-related reading frequency and literary readings.