Identifying and comparing competencies for social work management II: A replication study

In a replication study, fifty-four social work managers from a local metropolitan department of social services respond to the "Survey of Social Worker in Management Roles" describing how often they perform activities related to twelve dimensions of management. Their responses are compared to those obtained from an earlier national sample of 184 social work managers. A multivariate analysis of variance, controlling for management level, experience, and the interaction of level and sample, finds no significant difference between samples with respect to the frequency with which managers perform activities related to eleven of the twelve management dimensions. On a practical level, there appear to be no real differences between the two groups on any management dimension. These results provide greater confidence in the stability of the measure and in its findings but much work still needs to be done to establish the validity of the instrument. Further research directions are discussed.