A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY ON MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS INFLUENCING STUDENTS TO STUDY SOCIAL WORK

Abstract

Singapore faces a shortage of social workers and as Singapore's population ages, the demand for social services will continue to increase. While there are ongoing recruitment efforts to attract people into the profession, more can be done to improve such efforts. This requires an investigation on the motivational factors influencing students to study social work. Besides improving recruitment efforts, learning about individual's motivation to study social work could enhance social work academic and training programme to better meet individual's learning needs and retain people in the social work sector. Given that past studies in this domain appear to lack the utilization of theoretical framework, the study utilizes the expectancy-value theory to conduct a quantitative descriptive study on the motivational factors influencing NUS social work students' choice to study social work. Utilization of the expectancyvalue theory in this topic also allowed the study to test the potential applicability of this theory in the current domain. Limitation of the expectancy-value theory was taken into account and an additional component, fallback, was introduced. The combination of expectancy-value theory and fallback formed the conceptual framework. Guided by existing literature, the study mapped existing motivational factors from the literature and factors relevant to the Singapore's context onto the components of the expectancy-value theory and the component of fallback. A total of 19 motivational factors were mapped and investigated. The results revealed that motivational factors mapped under social utility value of the subjective task value component and motivational factors mapped under the component of individual's expectation for success were found to be important. Correlational analysis between the various components in the conceptual framework revealed significant relationship among components of the expectancy-value theory, with the strongest relationship between individual's expectation for success and subjective task value. The overall findings support the potential applicability of the expectancy-value theory in this domain. Implications on recruitment efforts, training and academic programme were also discussed.