Alcohol and Other Substance Use Training in Social Work Education: A Survey of Availability and Opportunities for “Hands On” Practice

The current study describes alcohol or other substance use specialization, certificate, and course availability in social work graduate programs in the United States. For comparison, we also describe mental or behavioral health courses given content overlap across these three areas of social work practice. In addition, clinical social work faculty teaching these types of courses were surveyed about their use of experiential teaching methods (i.e. peer-to-peer role plays and computer simulation trainings) that may enhance student opportunity for “hands on” practice in the classroom. Methods included content analyses of 313 Council on Social Work Education–accredited program websites and a national survey (N=655) of clinical social work faculty. We found that alcohol or other substance use specialization, certificate, and course availability was limited and comparatively less than that for mental or behavioral health. The majority of clinical faculty reported using experiential role plays at least often in their alcohol or other substance use and mental or behavioral health courses, but computer simulations were used rarely or never. Future studies should examine how role-play exercises are implemented in social work classrooms and explore barriers and facilitators to the use of technology-facilitated training methods such as computer simulation.