A study of the relationship between creativity and fieldwork performance of social work students

This study investigates the relationship between social work students’ creativity and their fieldwork performance. Systems theory provides a theoretical framework to explain the ambiguity, indeterminacy and uncertainty in social work practice, and account for the need for creativity during the helping process in fieldwork training. In this study, creativity was defined as the ability in divergent thinking with five dimensions, which are fluency, originality, elaboration, abstractness of titles and resistance to premature closure. The existing literature suggests that social work students’ creativity may have impact on their fieldwork performance in three areas, namely problem solving, application of theories and empathy. 52 social work students from a university in Hong Kong participated in this study and data regarding their creativity and fieldwork performance were collected. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to investigate relationships between participants’ competences in different dimensions of creativity and their fieldwork performance in each of the three fieldwork performance areas. Significant relationships were found between competences in two dimensions of creativity and fieldwork performance in those three areas. Both quadratic and linear significant relationships were found, and in some of them, the competences in some dimensions of creativity were found interacting with each other, and affecting each other’s relationship with fieldwork performance. The findings of this study provided detailed information about the possible relationships between social work students’ competences in different dimensions of creativity and their fieldwork performance in the three selected areas, and some tentative suggestions regarding potential use of the findings of this study for further development of social work curriculum were discussed. Further studies to confirm the findings of this study and to further investigate the possibility of enhancing social works students’ fieldwork performance through improving their competences in certain dimensions of creativity were recommended.