An Officer and a Therapist: How Active-Duty Social Workers Navigated the Ethical Hazards of Their Dual Agency

Active-duty LCSWs bear a simultaneous legal obligation to two entities that often have conflicting values and requirements for them to satisfy (the National Association of Social Workers and the Department of Defense), and this concurrent commitment routinely forces them to prioritize one side of their dual agency as both an officer and a therapist. The experience of having to navigate the ethically hazardous “mixed-agency dilemmas” that result from these competing prioritizations has been left unexamined in academic social work research. To respond to this gap in the literature, this qualitative pilot study examined the stories of seven formerly active-duty LCSWs using a reflexive thematic analysis. Common participant experiences included being subject to military medicine’s prioritization of DoD obligations over the NASW code of ethics, experiencing unavoidable dual relationships resulting from the intimate and boundaryless practice settings of operational medicine, and secondary gain issues of service members seeking mental health treatment as a way out of the military. While analyses of participants’ interviews revealed that LCSWs were often pressured to resolve mixed-agency dilemmas by favoring the officer side of their dual agency, participants overwhelmingly recommended navigating the mixed-agency dilemmas of their positions by prioritizing their identities as social workers, and by using the values and ethics of their licensure as a guiding heuristic while seeking out peer support and practicing self-care. This study recommends that MSW programs, the NASW, and military officer development schools increase their efforts to educate social workers on the reality of mixed-agency dilemmas in active-duty settings.

Author dc:creator

• Dickinson, Samuel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bell, Holly

• Social Work

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/60967

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/60967