Knowledge about women: a scale for clinical social workers

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1987
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Abstract
This thesis describes the development of the Knowledge About Women Scale, an instrument designed to measure clinical social worker's knowledge about women. The instrument was developed in response to concern within the profession about gender bias in clinical practice. The instrument was developed on the assumption that gender bias in clinical practice, as a manifestation of a practitioner's knowledge, negatively affects the quality of service provided to women clients, and that the development of a tool to assess knowledge about women will help in decreasing the degree of gender bias in clinical social work practice. For this study, a questionnaire was developed consisting of two parts. Part A contained eleven questions designed to elicit data for use as criterion variables, and four demographic questions. Part B contained 65 items intended to measure knowledge about women. The questionnaire was administered to 122 M.S.W. clinical social workers employed in the Calgary area. Reliability testing reduced the number of items in the instrument from 65 to 46. The reliability of the abridged instrument, using Cronbach's alpha, is reported as .912. The instrument is judged to i i i have content validity. The correlation coefficients among the eleven criterion variables and the instrument were statistically significant and ranged from .32 to .63, thereby indicating good concurrent validity. A final part of this thesis reports an examination of differences in item response patterns by gender. Overall, female respondents demonstrated significantly more accurate knowledge about women than male respondents. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the study's implications for social work research, education and practice.
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Bibliography: p. 124-136.
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Citation
Marshall, C. L. (1987). Knowledge about women: a scale for clinical social workers (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/15193
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