The Grand Challenges for Social Work, developed by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, include 12 broad-based social change initiatives to be accomplished in the next 10 years. The Grand Challenges strive to be social, scientific, and application oriented. That is, like the efforts of a scholar-practitioner, they focus on improving practice to meet complex social challenges.
Whichever initiative inspires or aligns with your area of focus, they all are featured in the social work research literature and are the guideposts for social work practitioners, policy makers, and researchers.
Engaging with these initiatives connects you with an even wider community of scholar-practitioners. In this Discussion, you identify a research topic to develop for your capstone in this program, aligning it with the Grand Challenges for Social Work.
To Prepare
Review the Grand Challenges for Social Work: Vision, Mission, Domain, Guiding Principles, & Guideposts to Action website and the Padilla and Fong (2016) article found in the Learning Resources.
In Week 1, you identified a potential capstone or dissertation topic, and you may have received some feedback from your peers and/or Instructor.
Observe how Walden’s scholar-practitioner model and its mission of effecting positive social change is aligned with the scientific and application-oriented nature of the Grand Challenges.
By Day 4
Post a response to the following:
Based on the feedback to your potential capstone or dissertation topic, in 2–3 sentences, refine your potential DSW capstone or PhD Social Work dissertation topic.
Explain how your topic might align with one of the Grand Challenges of Social Work.
In 3–4 sentences, explain how your topic fits within the scholar-practitioner model and can effect positive social change.
In 3–4 sentences, discuss the scope of the social problem that is underlying your topic. You must use peer-reviewed literature to support your claims.
In 2–3 sentences, discuss one consequence of the problem underlying your potential topic. You must use peer-reviewed literature to support your claims.
