Islamic Content in Leading Social Work Journals: A Missing Perspective in Disciplinary Discourse?

Overview: This analysis examined the inclusion of Islamic content in leading social work journals. The results indicate that Muslims were largely absent from the surveyed literature. This finding suggests the profession is poorly positioned to advocate for the basic human rights of Muslims, a population frequently targeted by hate crime perpetrators.Proposal text: Hate crimes represent a profound violation of people’s basic human rights (FBI, n.d.). Within the religion category, Muslims are the second most targeted group (FBI, 2020). Muslims were more likely to be victimized by hate crimes than Atheists, Agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs—combined.

A profession’s priorities—including social justice—are reflected in its literature (Kuhn, 1970). Content analysis is widely used to ascertain social work’s commitment to various groups and perspectives (Corley & Young, 2018; Gringeri et al., 2010; Marshall et al., 2011; Neuendorf, 2017; Scherrer & Woodford, 2013). Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to conduct a content analysis of discourse-shaping periodicals to determine the profession’s commitment to featuring content that depicts Muslims and their perspectives.

Method

Building upon previous analyses, articles were harvested from: Social Work, Social Work Research, Families in Society, Social Service Review, Child Welfare, Research on Social Work Practice, Journal of Social Service Research, Journal of Social Work Education, and Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research.

All issues published in the past decade were reviewed by two trained coders. Each coder independently coded each article (Corley & Young, 2018). After coding, the coders meet to resolve inconsistencies (Pelts et al., 2014). The analytic process was guided by a post-positivist epistemological perspective (Drisko & Maschi, 2016).

Results

Of the 3,746 refereed articles reviewed, 2.22% (Nf83) addressed spirituality or religion in some form, with 7 focusing on Islam. In other words, articles featuring Muslims or an Islamic perspective accounted for roughly 0.19 percent of all the articles that appeared in discourse-shaping periodicals over the examined 10-year time period. To put this finding in a broader context, the number of articles devoted to Islam would have to be increased by roughly 500% to achieve equity or parity with the percentage of Muslims in the general population (Pew Research Center, 2018).
Implications

American Muslims are a large and growing population that is frequently victimized by hate crimes (Husain, 2019), crimes that violate Muslims internationally recognized right to life, liberty and security (United Nations, 1948). Yet, the results suggest Muslims are largely invisible in leading social work periodicals. This raises questions about the profession’s ability to comply with its educational and ethical standards. For instance, CSWE’s (2015) EPAS call educators to create a religiously inclusive learning environment that equips students to competently engage religious diversity in practice (Competency 2). As with other populations, it is necessary for students to be exposed to content to address these competencies (Husain & Hodge, 2016).

Similar implications exist regarding social justice (Abdelgadir & Fouka, 2020; Béland et al., 2021). To equip social workers to ameliorate religious discrimination directed toward Muslims and safeguard their rights—as called for NASW Code of Ethics (2021: 6.04c,d)—it is imperative to have content that addresses prejudice directed toward Muslims (Smith, 2019).

The results underscore the need for additional content on Muslims. To serve the nation’s increasingly diverse population effectively, the profession’s literature should reflect the nation’s underlying diversity (Richards & Bergin, 2014).