Social workers play an important role into how society shapes itself for the future. They make sure children, families, and adults could survive, thrive, and interact with local communities. Most social workers spend their time trying to help people in lower income communities get whatever help they need, to improve their quality of life and decrease crime.
The problem is, there aren’t enough social workers to go around. Many social workers are over-worked, emotionally burdened, and asked to accomplish projects way too big for them.
Luckily, social workers aren’t alone. Thanks to big data, social workers can find where best to spend their time, discover best practices for helping individuals and communities and identity areas that some preventive action could help keep a community healthy.
Big Data Mapping Different Factors
With the right data, it’s possible to see patterns, trends, signals, and contributors to different elements of living in a low-income neighbourhood. Mapping out these different factors can give social workers guidance as to what type of actions they need to take to help the neighbourhood as a whole.
For example, let’s say a social worker wants to combat dangerous disease and help prevent illnesses like diabetes or heart disease. They can team up with doctors and hospitals to map out disease rates and cases in their town or community and try to find trends. Then, they can compare that mapping data to conditions that might be contributing to those health problems. A neighbourhood with a higher than normal rate of diabetes could be because they have less access to health foods or proper medical care.
Mapping out big data can help social workers focus on many different problems such as crime, unemployment, education, finances, housing, and more. By knowing exactly where these problems happen, and where they are rising, can help social workers focus on being in the right places at the right time.
This can be extremely helpful for rural areas that are underserved and social workers need to focus their efforts. They can find areas that need their help without having to spend large chunks of time hunting and getting to know individual communities.
Improving Education
Education is often a key factor in keeping a community healthy. Kids go to school, gain an education, can get a career that can support them and their family, and help improve society as a whole.
Yet, in low-income areas, education is often a neglected factor. Schools get little funding, educators look for the chance to move out and work at better-funded schools, and there is rarely good relationships between students and teachers.
If social workers and educators utilised big data, they could find where the children need the most help. By tracking things like test scores, attendance, dropout rates, and what students pursue higher education, they can find which areas they can work on to help kids get the education they need.
Predicting Future Problem Areas
With big data, it’s possible to find trends and clues that predates major events or why something happened. By analyzing past events, social workers can identity signs that a neighbourhood or area might be going downhill. Social workers can then use this to help predict, and prevent, problems and issues in their communities.
Communities don’t just go from good to poor overnight. It’s like a snowball rolling down a hill; it somebody stops it early, it’s easy, but the longer it goes down, the harder it is to stop. By recognising factors and signs that indicate a community is going downhill, social workers can make changes early to either prevent or slow it. That way, they aren’t just spending their time trying to fix an area, but actively preventing more problems from being created.
If social workers want to become more effective, they need to embrace big data. That also means getting the tools and data necessary to get accurate findings for their communities. The government, school system, healthcare, and everybody else needs to be willing to share their information with social workers for them to be truly effective.
Leave Comment