한국에서의 Spirituality와 사회사업에 대한 연구 동향과 전망

초록

There are emerging international trends in social work scholarship toward increasing attention to spirituality in research and publications. However, little has been published about this beyond the North American and European contexts. Therefore, this article explores the state of the art scholarly social work publications in an East Asian country, the Republic of Korea. First, a brief overview is given of the history and current situation of connections between spirituality and religions with social work in Korea. Then, results of a content analysis of Korean academic journal articles are presented to indicate the state of the art and implications for further work, including international collaborations. The content analysis revealed that there is relatively little empirical work in this area, although it has grown in recent years. Most of the empirical research is based on simple statistical methods while systematic qualitative studies are lacking. Conceptual work provides guidelines for various religious specific approaches to social work; development of approaches that are inclusive of diverse religious and nonreligious spiritual perspectives is just beginning. However, there are indications of the potential for a significant increase of scholarly work on spirituality and social work. International collaborations could facilitate this.

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