This study aims to identify whether the professional training of social workers has an effect on the attitudinal antecedents of turnover intention. This study investigated 395 trained and 353 non-trained social workers from the Integrated Family Service Centers in Guangzhou, China. It was found that professional education did not significantly alter the attitudinal antecedents to turnover intention. In both groups, a higher feeling of burnout or a lower level of organizational commitment produced a higher intention of turnover. Furthermore, the significant influences of burnout and organizational commitment were found to be respectively mediated by job satisfaction with professional association or job satisfaction with organizational environment. This study not only provides insights into the stabilization of the emerging workforce of Chinese social workers, but also poses serious questions about social work education.

Summary: This article reports the results of an exploratory comparative study that investigated errors made by social work practitioners. Two groups of social workers, one in Italy and one in Mainland China, answered questions about the causes and effects of mistakes, professional errors and reactions to errors committed by their colleagues, and the influence of intuition on the decision-making process that generates mistakes and errors of professional judgement. Findings: The most salient differences between the Italian and Chinese respondents related to their willingness to talk about their mistakes and their confidence in the training received. A longer social work tradition in Italy helps practitioners in that country to feel stronger and to engage in a reflective learning process rather than defensive actions. As members of a new and not yet fully recognized profession, social workers in Mainland China are more likely to blame external circumstances for negative outcomes. Both groups shared the same positive consideration of intuition and the risk of losing service users’ trust. Applications: The purpose of the article is to foster better understanding of errors and mistakes in social work, as well as more open discussion and reflection on social work practice and how to prevent negative outcomes.

Reflection is widely practiced in human service professions, but little research has examined whether reflection actually translates into action and, if so, how. This article explores the possibilities and limits of reflective practice by drawing on data collected through reflective interviews with fifteen Chinese social workers on mistakes in practice. The findings demonstrate that social workers in China are aware of being reflective, even critically reflective, by pondering mistakes and failures they have encountered. Their reflections, however, do not extend to future action plans. Rather, they prefer to rely on manual-based knowledge providing explicit guidance, reflecting their developing reflective capacity and low professional identity. The article argues that social workers’ reflective awareness needs to be built up, while fully recognising the limits of reflection. To address mistakes, not only do we need to create opportunities for practitioners to reflect, but also to address the risk-management strategies of social work organisations and the independent roles that should be performed by professional social work associations in Mainland China.

Social work education has extended globally and has developed in China at an unprecedented speed. Serious attention must be paid to how the global spread of social work education interacts with developments in China. This study describes and assesses an international collaboration in field education between six European and Chinese universities using multiple data sources in Guangdong Province. Trust, disciplinary unity and local participation in the collaboration generated good practices in developing Chinese field education, including linking and preparing universities and agencies from developed and less developed areas, implementing a well-defined learning process with a competence-based perspective and training supervisors through training the trainers. Moreover, positive outcomes of this project were identified, including high satisfaction by both students and supervisors and increasing levels of supervisors’ self-efficacy and students’ competencies. In future, international collaboration should focus more on the issue of indigenisation.