Day 16

Finally managed to submit my transcripts of all the FGD sessions today after formatting the transcripts and figuring out the seating arrangments. I realised that there were some areas which I forgot to clean up properly (an oversight in the midst of my excitement at completing everything) and so I cleaned those up as well. Being able to submit my transcripts today was quite a happy thing for me as it means that I can move on to the other forms of work I have to do.

Upon attempting to continue my research work today for the literature review, I realised that I had trouble accessing the articles from my NUS account. While I could access the journals, I could not access the articles themselves within the journals. This was extremely frustrating as that meant I could not download the relevant articles, and no amount of my attempting to "reboot" the e-journal system could rectify the problem.

This reminded me of the many times I have had seniors from social work, who had already graduated and were working in the field, ask us to help them access these journals for their research work. While I would never begrudge helping them, I did wonder why they had to ask us for help - shouldn't their agencies and organisations have access to these journals as well? Until we realise that it's extremely expensive to subscribe to these journals and databases, which is why individual agencies tend not to have access to them, and why (strangely enough) the university has a greater variety of journals to access than the various hospitals do.

This to me is quite absurd as we so often are reminded of the need for evidence based practise (EBP), yet to do so would require regular research and forays into what new developments are happening in the field, which would require access to these journals - which we do not have. The question then is why we do not have a central union or society that is willing to purchase subscriptions to these journals and databases, which agencies and social workers can then pay a small fee to tap on. Even the university library membership does not allow access to E-journals and articles, even if you get the "premium" membership - which I find ridiculous, as you are paying no small sum yet you do not get access to what is crucial to every field of research (not merely social work).

While the SASW is doing its best to help professionalise the sector (through things such as accreditation, etc.) I feel that it has the capacity to do a lot more to help the sector, and setting up such a programme would not require as much manpower or logistics (I think) as other things such as accreditation, yet would greatly help to bring the profession to the next level. Makingsuch research resources avaliable to the greater social work community would help to greater professionalise the sector by supporting the drive towards EBP, allowing us to stay abreast of new developments in the field to better serve our clients, and also putting to rest any worries other professions (such as psychologists and psychiatrists) have that we are simply going by "gut feel" without using "proper, sound, evidenced" techniques.

Day 15

I finally finished transcribing all the FGDs! And in time for the deadline of end May as well! The only thing left to do is to format them and make sure that I have finished translating all the words that I had trouble with, that the structure is the same for all the FGDs, and that the unedited portions of raw data are cleaned up.

During this process of transcribing I have come to think about my mother and father growing older. My mum turns 54 this year, while my dad turns 51 - and this is around the same age as some of the participants in the FGDS. Two of my uncles are 60 and over, which technically could classify them as being senior citizens already. Yet I don't think of any of them as being elderly or being senior citizens - they are all so active and don't look their age. In addition to that I suppose the image of them that I always keep in mind is of the way they were when I was growing up, which would be them in their late 30s and early to mid 40s. So when I look at them, I know they are older, but it doesn't quite register somehow. I guess it's a lot more difficult for us to accept that our parents are growing older and will be classified as "elderly" soon, because we never envision our parents growing old. It's almost as if we expect to grow up, and expect them to remain at the same "immortal" age forever, just older than us.

This will have implactions for how we care for our parents in the future, as well as the expectations we place on ourselves in reference to them. For example, I can't imagine having to send my mother to the hospital for regular checkups in the future, the way she does (and sometimes the rest of us) do with my grandmother. That to me still feels like the extremely distant (if ever) future, yet I have to be realistic and understand that that day will come eventually.


In this case, I would have to say that it is always about a mindset change, of us having to be able to be aware of our mindset now in relation to where our mindset will "have to be" or how it will have to evolve, and it would be better if we anticipated and prepared for it. In this way, we can walk ourselves through it (the changing of mindset) instead of getting a shock one day when we realise that our parents have grown old and that the tables have now turned - we are the caregivers, instead of being the ones cared for.



I think that this would be perhaps the most drastic (and often times painful) mindset change, because it requires such a huge role reversal that we are often not prepared for in society. We expect to become parents one day, we expect to become grandparents, but we do not expect to become the caregivers for our parents (though it remains in our subconscious thought that we will one day). It not only involves us taking on an additional role, but involves us changing where we place our parents in terms of how we organise our lives, and also requires that we give up a part of our "identity" (being the child who can always ask one's parents for help). One day, should our parents ever become so frail that we have to look after them like children or newborns even, that would be the most painful, because we would remember the way they used to be when we were young, being completely incongruous with the way they are now.

I certainly do not relish the day when I have to admit to myself that my parents are old, and that I must take on the role of caregiver. I am not sure if I am ready to start looking after my parents at all, and if I ever will be. Fortunately, both my parents are ridiculously healthy, going to the gym frequently and watching their diets consciously, and I am especially thankful that they are both mentally sound. I just hope that when the day comes when I have to help look after them that I will be prepared and know what to do.

Day 14

The day started quite horribly as I lost my phone on the bus ride to work, and could not trace it - which meant I had to get a replacement phone during the lunch break today. So this did keep me mildly distracted during the morning as I tried to sort it out. However getting it replaced allowed me to go back to concentrating on work, and I was able to finish transcribing the fourth FGD, and have started on the 6th FGD (since the 5th was not recorded).

Trying to transcribe this FGD was a little bit more difficult as there were parts spoken in Hokkien which I did not entirely understand (though I could make out bits and pieces here and there). It was quite interesting hearing the elderly switch between Chinese and Hokkien, as if they were aware that Chinese was more "convenient" for the group, but Hokkien was the main "comfort" language, the one they were most at home with and would slip back to now and then.

It made me think about how different the generations have become in such a short span of years, just because of the policies instituted with regards to the "official" language of Singapore and the education system, with English becoming the medium of communication. While dialect is the most comfortable for my grandmother's generation (and mandarin is passable but not their preferred language necessarily), my mother's generation is most comfortable with English or Chinese in general, while dialect is still used quite frequently, and the majority of my generation is most comfortable with English (although Chinese is still used quite a fair bit) and dialect has almost completely disappeared from our vocabularies. This is of course to do with my specific ethnic group (Chinese) and doesn't speak for the other ethnic groups (such as the Malays and Indians, where for example the Malays do use their mother tongue to quite a large extent still).

What intrigues me is how in a short span of about 40-50 years we have completely changed our mode of communication, and how this seems to be more prevalent amongst the Chinese than the other ethnic groups. This has of course had wider repurcussions, in terms of creating quite a large language and communication barrier between the generations, particularly between mine and my grandparents' generation. Amongst my friends as it is I'm one of the "better" ones in that I can understand and speak Cantonese (although I still need to expand my vocabulary), and I am very comfortable speaking in Mandarin. Most of my friends cannot understand or speak any dialect (except for the vulgarities), and they are not fluent in Mandarin either.

The problem then is that, as it is, the generations already have gaps due to the different environments in which we grew up. With society and technology advancing as rapidly as it is, this gap (in terms of understanding) will simply continue to grow. Having an additional barrier to communication and "connectedness" due to langauge differences makes it even harder to connect to our grandparents generation. Personally this is one of the reasons why working directly with the elderly would be more difficult for me, and I suspect that this might be the case for my peers as well (thus deterring us from going into the eldercare sector).

For my fellow social work students (in my cohort), we have been wanting a proper "dialect school" to be set up to help us learn how to speak the more common dialects in Singapore, so that we will be able to communicate more easily with the elderly. This obviously has yet to be set up, but it is an area that could be looked into. For all the government's talk of wanting to keep family ties in place, one of the greatest keys is communication (as the FGD participants have all pointed out), and so something needs to be done to educate the younger generation (who can still absorb and learn more) so that they can communicate with the elderly, to strengthen these family bonds. The issue is whether the younger generation sees the need for this and can be bothered to learn. Particularly since dialects seem to be "dying out" or at least becoming a rare breed, whether this is even necessary (though I would say it is even if only to preserve our heritage) might be brought up. Ultimately it's whether there is a need from the ground up, which can fit into (and fill) the gap that has sprung up between the generations, which society (and the govenrment) thinks there is a need to address.

Day 13

I am almost done transcribing the fourth FGD, which means that after this I only have one more to transcribe and I am essentially done (barring needing to look through the transcripts again for formatting and checking the two that I need to just check the notes for). It's quite exciting knowing that I am almost done with one of the tasks for this placement, and on time as well (given how this needs to be done by end May). There is a sense of accomplishment and excitement as I begin to move on to the next phase of tasks - and as the entire review begins to take shape (as I do the analysis and literature review). I will however need to figure out how the review should be structured, as the literature review does still revolve around the effectiveness of counselling for elderly (and the population in general) whereas the themes in the FGD revolve around client awareness and the need for public education about what counselling entails as well as how it can help people. Constructing the implications from both these areas of the review will be interesting as both are so different and call for different actions to be put in place - which might mean choosing one over the other, should budget be an issue.

I attended the SDD talk, and that was interesting as I got to hear about the statistics to do with the elderly - both current and projected statistics. The statistics are quite enlightening in terms of how the ageing population is going to affect us in the future, both as a nation and within the social service sector itself. I suspect that the degree of impact is a lot less than what the government has projected currently, just because in the past the government has stated that enough was being done to help elder/target the ageing population - something anyone in the social service sector would have serious doubts about. Particularly after hearing about the sheer numbers we are going to have to deal with, we might have difficulty coping with problems like dementia and depression in the future. This might not so much be due to an increase in prevalence of the disease (as in it's affecting a greater majority of people - which would then need us to examine why it was becoming more prevalent) but just the sheer number of people having it increasing, because of the baby boomers ageing.

Again this makes me think about the future generation of elders - those from my mother's generation, and what type of services and programmes they would need. With a rising number getting divorced and having fewer children to support them, apart from their possible need for financial support, there will be greater need for their socio-emotional needs to be met. This could be done through counselling, through more activities being organised by the CCs and RCs and SACs, and by roping in religious organisations to help "keep them occupied". Whether the future generation of seniors would actually use these programmes however remains to be seen, particularly as they would be more educated and thus the current programmes might not be suited to their needs/wants in terms of how to occupy their time.

This provision of more programmes to meet the demand by the growing number of seniors would also mean a need for more manpower to help run these programmes - and as it is there are insufficient people going into the older adults sector, with most preferring to work with youth and children. Somehow I feel that this is due to our stereotype about what working with the elderly entails - amongst which includes the necessity to know dialects and mandarin. While this will still be important in the future, I suspect that the future generation of elderly will be more well-versed in English, given how most of them were educated in English schools. As such there is a need for us to revise our idea of what work in the older adults sector entails, to keep up with the times and attract new blood to the sector. If we package it in such a way as to show budding social workers (and people from related disciplines) that the work would be challenging and would require a lot of creativity (as they think of new, interesting, and relevant programmes), this could help to somehow draw more people in. Suffice to say we need to make the sector look dynamic and interesting, comparable to working with youth.

Gerontology was another topic that was featured during the talk, and I studied social gerontology in school. It was quite interesting learning social gerontology, particularly learning about the typical stereotypes regarding the elderly/older adults. A lot of these stereotypes have to do with the primary and secondary characteristics of aging, with the stereotypes arising mainly from the secondary characteristics being mistaken for primary characteristics. For example, a lot of people believe that dementia is a "normal" aging process, or that majority of the population gets it. While dementia is linked to genetics, it is not as prevalent as everyone thinks. However it still is a serious problem, and in sheer numbers alone it is going to increase a lot in the next few years. Thus there is a need to educate people on how to detect early warning signs of dementia so they can get the proper medical care and slow down the process, yet also emphasise that it is not a normal aging process. We also need to educate the younger generation to a) learn how to look for early warning signs of dementia in their parents, b) learn how to care for their parents who have dementia (or make preparations for their care), and c) how to prepare for it themselves - in terms of learning how to stave off dementia.

The issue here is that there is a fine line to tread between causing mass hysterics (i.e. everyone thinking they will get dementia) and breeding ignorance (i.e. not knowing the signs of dementia and living in denial about it). This is especially more difficult if the younger generation is not interested in learning about the illness, or sees no need to (because they think that it is so far away from affecting them, either directly or indirectly). We need to somehow breed curiosity and concern in the younger ones to want to learn about this process, how it could affect their parents (and thus indirectly them), how it could affect them directly, and try to get them out of an apathetic state (or the sense of invulnerability that youth seems to bring) and into a "knowing" and caring state.

Day 12

I am finally done transcribing the 3rd FGD, which is the longest one yet. Despite it being conducted in English, it still was not the easiest thing to transcribe - again because of the voices being muffled. However it was easier to figure out what they were saying than the previous FGD recordings. Suddenly I'm quite thankful that the FGD with the Lion Befrienders was done in English and without a recording device, because it means that I merely have to neaten up the notes and don't have to do anymore transcribing, though it meant being slightly more stressed during the FGD itself.

After transcribing about half of the FGDs, I'm beginning to get quite excited about doing the analysis, because I am beginning to see so many common themes and issues popping up amongst the various groups. However I would probably have to do some revision about doing FGD analysis (i.e. qualitative analysis) as I have not done this before.

I have to say that I am enjoying this field placement more than what my friends had thought (as they did warn me prior that, this being indirect work with a lot of research, I might get bored due to the lack of human contact). When doing direct work I hardly had sufficient time to sit and truly reflect about the theoretical and macro perspectives about the work I was doing or seeing being done. Instead, I was more focused on reflecting about my microskills, about how the clients were doing and the various cases I was seeing. Being able to take a step back and use different skills and look at things from a different perspective is refreshing.

Doing this placement is making me consider how it would be beneficial for all social work students to do at least one micro and one macro field placement each, so that they get a better feel of the field. Or, for honors social work students to do an additional field placement or internship in a macro setting (so that would total two micro setting placements and one macro setting placement). This way they get to experience two very different direct practise methods/settings and environments, and get to experience indirect work as well. While it was unfortunate that I have to redo my placement, in many senses I am very thankful that I do get to experience three different practise settings, as that gives me a much better understanding of how all the different aspects/arms of the social services work and how they interact and influence each other. The logistics of doing a third placement however would possibly not be welcomed by the school or the students, particularly as it does eat at the school holidays. It would be an interesting thing to suggest to the school however - particularly in relation to modules such as policy planning and research.

Day 11

Trying to complete the transcribing today was extremely frustrating because the participants on the recording were so muffled, I had to keep replaying the same segment for 20 minutes to suss out what the speakers are all saying. This is both due to the quality of the recording itself (it being very echoy and participants not being equidistant from the recorder) and also my earphones - which are not of very good quality. Oddly enough this is making me appreciate my older pair of earphones which had a very clear sound. Although this is not actually related to social work at all.

The good thing is that I am almost done transcribing the first FGD. And slowly I am beginning to appreciate how difficult it is to be a transcriber. The most difficult thing to do is to decipher what the different "layers" of people are saying, because so often there are multiple people speaking at once. Then you need to figure out who is merely chit chatting, who is adding important information to the dialogue, and who is actually answering the question. While it would be much easier for me if we made them take turns or signal before they spoke during the discussion, that would obviously be problematic and create too much cumbersome structure to the FGD, which would affect how much information and opinions are generated during the discussion itself. In fact I feel that the more interactive the group is amongst themselves (without the facilitator intruding) the better, because then they are more likely to bounce ideas off each other, build on those ideas, and there's a greater sense of which opinions are shared amongst the group and which are personal (and possibility minority) opinions.

One thing that I have taken note of though is how my supervisor conducts the FGD. Being able to review the tapes allows me to pay closer attention to the soft skills used (as opposed to during the discussion itself when I am scrambling to take down notes). I realised that it's almost like a "mass counselling" session, in the sense that each participant is attended to individually and allowed to carry on for a bit before being pulled back to the main line of discussion. This happens even if the discussion goes seemingly off-tangent for a while, so that the dicussion still flows but the structure still does remain (but it's more flexible). I also realised that by doing this, we managed to discover quite a few things that we would not have if we had stayed entirely strictly to the few questions given. By following the participants on their train of thought, we managed to discover new points that we initially did not plan on picking up (for example the idea of the lack of awareness and publicity with regards to counselling), and it actually helped us to realise that the focus of the review needed to be tweaked (or at least put on the back-burner while other issues needed to be dealt with first).

This illustrates very clearly to me the gap that often exists between the perceived needs of clients (as dictated by the "experts" in the industry) and the real/felt needs of the service users/clients themselves. So often we assume that because we can see how certain services/programmes are useful/efficacious in dealing with certain issues/problems, that the existence of these issues/problems dictates that we must introduce these programmes/services immediately. However, so often we do this without doing a needs assessment, or having a dialogue with the service users to find out what they feel is the issue that must be dealt with or addressed first. For example, this review was intended to ascertain the effectiveness of counselling and whether service users would use such services - yet what we found out is that they weren't aware of such a service, and that they did not even understand what "counselling" is about. In such a case, the effectiveness of counselling can then be considered irrelevant, or at least not of immediate concern, because the service itself is not even understood. If something is not understood, clients cannot possibly discern how such a service could benefit them, and would thus not utilise the service.

Tying in with my previous post where I discussed thinking about the client as a customer instead, we need to understand what the clients want and what they understand as being what they want before we can provide services that they will utilise and find useful. To tie this in with our position as knowing what could benefit clients without clients realising it at all, what we can do is find out what the clients want (e.g. emotional relief, financial aid, problem resolution), then match it up with specific services/programmes which we know would fit the bill and help them resolve their issues, and explain to the clients how these services will help. We cannot continue to merely prescribe programmes and services and expect clients to be positively affected by them, as people tend to be more resistant towards things they do not understand. We need to begin to think of clients as thinking and opinionated individuals, and "demystify" what the services provided are.

Day 10 - part 2

Today we conducted the final two FGDs for the counselling review. I was quite excited because the FGDs were held at a Senior Activity Centre, which I had never been inside or actually encountered before. I'm not sure if the place "met" my preconceptions of what an SAC is supposed to look like, but it did seem quite empty, and for some reason I was looking for a karaoke set hmmm...

I got the chance to do the FGD today, which was quite exciting because I had never conducted a discussion group with clients or service users previously. It was different this time because while I had conducted groupwork with youths previously, it is entirely different when you conduct a group with adults whom you are actually asking a favour from (as opposed to conducting a programme with). I was quite conscious about needing to go down to their educational level and not to sound as "ang moh" as I usually do, and while typically being local is not an issue, for some reason when it comes to work I tend to be more "official" sounding, for lack of a better word. This time I felt that my sounding more polished worked against me to some extent because it would mean that no matter how well I could connect with the participants in terms of content, they would not not reach that level of comfort of being able to share as freely with me as I would have liked. Since this was my first FGD I don't expect to be able to so quickly fit in with the participants; however it is something I need to take note of and work on in future work.

What made me a bit more cautious about the FGD was that it needed Malay translation because most of the participants were more comfortable with speaking in Malay. I have never worked with a translator before, and often it is a bit difficult to know whether I should ask for a translation or wait for the translator (in this case the manager of the SAC) to translate. I was also unsure if the participants were quiet because they could not understand what I was saying or if they were thinking or shy to answer. I was also unsure if I should ask them individually, something I observed my supervisor doing frequently - I wanted to, but was hesitant of sounding repetitive. The few times I tried to ask them individually (by directing the quesitons at the quieter ones), they tended not to answer, or the more prominent ones would end up speaking up instead. I think I could have made better use of the translator, by asking him to translate and to prompt each of them to give an answer - this way I could have elicited individual replies from all the participants instead.

I also need to learn to simplify questions I realise. I tried to but I was not always successful - something I realised during the session itself. I need to be quicker at being able to assess the level of understanding of the participants, to pick out the words that they would have trouble with, and find ways and means to be able to rephrase the terms into phrases they would understand and relate to. However it was quite heartening to be able to elicit responses from the participants, though it would have been good if I could have generated enough rapport with them and within the group itself for the participants to start discussing amongst themselves.

I attended the disability network in the afternoon, which was quite interesting. Having someone who straddles both the service provider and service user worlds brings a lot of interesting things to the table, in terms of being able to provide better insight into the service gaps and service possibilities for working with the disabled. I often wonder what it's like, when you have people with disabilities working in the social services - do they feel a greater sense of motivation, and do they feel a greater need to advocate for clients? Do they empathise more with clients because they experience similar problems and challenges, or do they somehow become more disdainful of the clients precisely because they had the same (or similar) challenge in life, yet they (service provider) managed to overcome these challenges and become successful? And as a client, would I feel better understood and more comfortable with a therapist or service provider who had either the same or a similar disability as me? How would this affect how I react to therapy/treatment/service provision? This would actually be a very interesting area of research to look into, and could have potential implications in the field of social work with the disabled.

The speaker also talked about a new way of thinking of the client as a customer, and how when you think of customers you think of profit, you think of businesses - in which case you would do anything to make the customer happy. In light of that, the phrase "the customer is always right" comes to mind. In contrast, when we think of the term "client", that tends to bring to mind the idea that we as service providers are the experts, and that we should tell the client what they should do. While we are taught that the client is the expert of their own lives, we inevitably will tend to think of how their lives fit together and will impose our own ideas of what is better for them. However, if we think of the client as a customer, then we will strive to meet every one of their needs (instead of the bare minimum), and see how else we can serve them aside from just what they come to us for (e.g. they may approach us for financial aid, but could benefit from family counselling and youth programmes for the children). In this way we stop taking our position for granted, and return to what the profession is actually about - serving people, in a manner that addresses their lives holistically, using our expertise not to exploit but to find additional areas to help them.