An Exploration of Life Skills among Social Work Students

Abstract

The Life skills can be defined as “abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life” (WHO) 1 . The definition states that it is the ability of an interaction to choose optimal communicative behaviour for successful accomplishment interaction and mentions that it is a process of generating skilled behaviour directed to relate appropriately in different situations. ‘An Exploration of Life Skills among Social Work’ was an effort to learn about enhancement of life skills during respondents study duration in post graduation. The life skills in the present context have geared up with high demands in all the fields. Ten core life skills noted by WHO were central to the present study. The focus of life skills is seen to be very much applicable to social work education. Bartlett in 1970 described the “central focus of social work as helping people to cope with life situations and helping them to balance the demands of their social environment”. And life skills have the same aim and objective to help individuals to cope with life situations in today’s life and balance their lifestyle in a manner that the social environment demands in the present context. The literature review addresses several issues like correctional aspects, racism, educational coping, adolescents concerns, well being and cognitive development, domestic violence etc. since the emergence of life skills aspects. The study focused with the aim to understand the enhancement of life skills with the impact of educational teaching learning, fieldwork and co curricular and extra curricular activities during respondents study duration and also suggesting a strategy. Adult Learning Theory or Andragogy (Malcolm Knowles 1968) describes theory through the study of how adults learn and how it is different from children learning. It identifies the learning style that best suits to the present respondents. The theory learns the five assumptions; self concept, adult learning experience, readiness, orientation and motivation to learning that was added later. The theory gets more applicable to the training especially with the adults or youth. The mixed methods was adopted to study the different elements of research and followed a procedure in a scientific way to learn more valid results. The present study used an evaluative research design that was inclusive of quantitative and qualitative elements for the best results. Interestingly, respondents were enhanced with life skills at a significant level from a pretest to post test in quantitative study. The inferences were also made from qualitative data that showed drastic change and improvement in developing life skills among social work students. It was recommended from the study that students should be created a scope in first semester to develop with life skills that are derived from society that should be also inclusive of digital skills, second semester must be introduced with thinking skills activities, third semester with coping skills very much related to feelings and emotions and finally in the fourth semester professional life skills. Steptoe A. and Wardle J. (2017) 2 , learnt that life skills are responsible for a range of outcomes and maintenance in an individual’s later life. Whole system of education in social work at postgraduate level has ensured to face any obstacles or barriers and grow with inner abilities and one of them is life skills.