Abstracts Social Work

Video feedback and its impact on the development of communication skills within social work education.

by Janine Bolger

Video feedback has been utilised in training situations across a range of professional disciplines such as medicine and psychotherapy, and its use in developing communication and selfassessment skills has also been experimented with in social work education. In particular, the Robert Gordon University is increasingly using video feedback to prepare and assess Social Work students in readiness for practice. In order to help in future course planning and delivery this study seeks to investigate the effectiveness of video feedback in improving communication skills amongst Social Workers in training. For such purposes eleven second year Social Work undergraduates were selected as participants in a pre-test post-test design intended to collect a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. Although video feedback did not result in any significant difference in outcomes, the results suggest an improvement in areas like self-efficacy and confidence and increased awareness of the importance of core communication skills. Further research is required to clarify the role of affective skills, e.g. empathetic attunement which should underpin the communication behaviours being measured. With an increased emphasis on the teaching and assessment of communication skills, the outcome of this research has wider implications for social work education in general.