An investigation of the factors affecting ethical decision making processes of social workers

Social work is a discipline and a profession that is based on human values and provides services by re-delivering human rights to people with knowledge, skills and values. The ethical principles based on the value of the profession and based on this principle are defined as the roadmap of the ethical decision-making process in professional practice. However, it can not be ruled out that there are other factors besides the ethical values of the profession in the ethical decision making process of the social worker who is composed of different values because of being a person. The main purpose of this research is to understand the individual, social, organizational and occupational factors that influence the ethical decision-making processes of social workers. At this point, it is important to understand how the experts' prior knowledge, skills and value bases, how their individual values and assessments affect the ethical decision-making process, the institutional and bureaucratic barriers, social policies, workload and lack of supervision are influential in the ethical decision- the difficulties they face, and the understanding of the role of ethical principles and ethical decision-making in dealing with these difficulties. For this purpose, methodological qualitative research was chosen and experts' opinions and experiences about values perception, ethical principles and ethical decision making processes were tried to be understood. In this direction, in-depth interviews were conducted with 13 social service experts working in the field of child welfare under the Ministry of Family and Social Policy and working in Ankara. The subjects are social workers with 3 profession and years of experience. Nine of them are working in the Child Protection Unit of Ankara Family and Social Policies Provincial Directorate and four in Ankara Children's Homes Site. As a result of the research, it appears that the opinions of the values of the social workers and their opinions about the way of getting the values are different. It is also understood that they consider professional ethics principles and their ethical sensitivity is very high. Experts endeavor to implement professional practice by prioritizing ethical principles and values of the profession in ethical decision-making processes. However, it has also been found that, in ethical decision-making processes, individual or professional values are sometimes used as an appraisal in the form of appraisal. Experts have talked about different kinds of problems that make ethical decision making difficult. Among them, the existence of institutional culture and bureaucratic oppression is especially remarkable. Experts have learned that they are trying to resist this edition. In addition, the time constraint of excess workload emerged as another problem that adversely affected the ethical decision-making process. Again, it is understood that the excess of workload and, in addition, the lack of supervision cause experts to live alone in the ethical decision-making process. Experts have indicated that these two deficiencies cause them to be exhausted. It has also emerged that other professionals who do the same work as field experts do not have the base of knowledge, skills and value when they are not trained in social work, and that this situation worries professionals to reduce ethical sensitivity. It has been learned that the value of the profession will be reduced due to faulty professional practices to be made by other professional staff coming from outside the field due to lack of professional equipment and there is a tendency to increase negative thoughts about the profession. Besides, in academic education, values also expressed their desire to increase the quality of education. It has emerged that in order to be able to properly carry out the ethical decision-making processes of social workers, they want to bring value education in academic education to a qualified position, that they need supervision support in order to reduce individual evaluations, they want to reduce workload and psychological support to cope with burnout. In addition, experts have agreed that by stopping off-site assignments, the social work profession should be prevented from losing reputation due to misapplication and preventing the applicants from suffering loss of rights. Key Words: Values of Social Work, Ethical Principles of Social Work, Ethical Decision Making