Measuring and improving of perceived competence in social work profession

The aim of this research is to develop a scale that aims to measure perceived competence for the social work profession. In addition, the other purpose of this research is to test the significance of the perceived competencies of social workers with the university they graduated from, frequency of participation in voluntary activities, working time and gender. In the research, the sequential mixed patterns model, which is one of the mixed methods, was used. In the first part of the study, which consists of two parts, the validity and reliability of the scale were tested, and in the second part, the hypotheses were tested. For construct validity, an item pool consisting of 109 items was submitted to expert opinion and a draft scale of 40 items was formed. The draft form was applied to 469 participants for Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Then, in order to test the invariance of the scale, whose validity phases were completed, against time, it was administered to 28 participants twice, with 15-day intervals. IBM SPSS Grad Pack Base v28 was used for data analysis. A scale including 3 factors named Professional Knowledge, Professional Skills, Professional Value and 40 items was formed. The obtained structure was evaluated by confirmatory factor analysis. The DFA application was implemented in the R programming language with the "lavaan" package (Rosseel, 2012) in LISREL and SPSS AMOS programs. In the reliability phase, the test-retest method and the Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient were used. As a result of the hypothesis tests, there was no difference in the distribution of the average scores obtained from the perceived professional competence scale according to the universities graduated from. A significant relationship was found between the frequency of participation in voluntary activities and the average scores obtained from the perceived professional competence scale. A significant relationship was found between the working years of the participants and the average scores they got from the perceived professional competence scale. There was no significant difference in the distribution of the participants' average scores from the perceived professional competence scale according to the gender variable.