Examining the impact of artificial intelligence on social work from the perspectives of students within a SWOT analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a system that imitates human intelligence to fulfil certain tasks and can improve itself by repeating the information it collects. It has started to be used more and more in all areas of life. Since social work that makes interventions wherever there are people, aims to solve problems and meet the needs, it encounters AI directly or indirectly. The group that will use AI applications the most in the future is today's social work students who will do this profession. The aim of this study is to examine the views of social work students on the impact of AI on the social work within the framework of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis. This study was designed in qualitative research model and focus group technique was used to collect data. The study group of the research consisted of 29 social work students who were placed in three different focus groups labelled as A, B and C. Eight of the participants were male and 21 were female; their ages ranged between 20 and 39. They had internships in areas such as child welfare, medical social work, social assistance, elderly, disability, family welfare and migration. Data were collected through twelve focus group discussions with groups A, B and C in four different sessions. Sociodemographic questionnaire and semi-structured interview form were used as data collection tools. The interviews conducted on the Zoom platform were audio recorded and the recordings were converted into Microsoft Word documents. The data obtained were transferred to the MAXQDA 2022 and coding was based on the framework associated with SWOT analysis. The findings were organized around four main themes: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths include the sub-themes of efficiency, innovation, and access to information; weaknesses include the sub-themes of user characteristics, doubts about AI, emotional inadequacy, inability of AI to make social work intervention; opportunities include the sub-themes of opportunities for the client, for social workers and for social work education; and threats include the sub-themes of ethical sensitivities, workforce, human behavior. The results of the research show that social work students think that AI can be useful in social work in terms of speed, efficiency, innovation, risk analysis, evidence-based practice. The features of AI such as not being able to understand emotions, not being able to empathize, not using body language were evaluated as weaknesses. Features such as enabling case simulations in social work education, developing software and hardware in accordance with the needs of the clients, providing decision support and supervision were seen as opportunities. In terms of threats, it was thought that AI may create ethical violations on issues such as confidentiality and security of the client, violation of uniqueness, risk of increasing inequality and increase unemployment. As a result, it can be recommended to add AI trainings to the social work curriculum, to increase AI literacy, to support the use of AI by social workers, to develop ethical rules and standards to protect the delicate balance between AI and social work, to encourage interdisciplinary studies in this field, to create client-centered AI applications.