Human rights and Social Work in Mexico: notions, commitments and vocation in the student

Abstract

Human Rights represent one of the fundamental principles in the international definition of Social Work. A quantitative research is proposed through a descriptive-correlational design with the objective of analyzing the attitudes of the students of the Mexican Social Work degree towards human rights. A self-administered questionnaire was applied to 610 students from the Autonomous University of Nuevo León (UANL) and the University of Guadalajara (UdeG), selected through stratified random sampling. The instrument included: (1) a sociodemographic questionnaire, (2) the vocational component scale, (3) the scale of areas of intervention of Social Workers, (4) the Likert scale of resilience and (5) the Scale of Notions on Human Rights in Social Work (NDHTS) and of Commitment to Human Rights in Social Work (CDHTS). The results show the inference of the advantage/utility dimension in the vocational component of the students, as well as a greater weight of the self-acceptance and life dimension in terms of resilience. The knowledge acquired in vocational training is higher than that achieved in daily life and the level of commitment to human rights is medium-high. Directly proportional correlations were observed between the different scales and differences based on sociodemographic characteristics. It is considered necessary to promote the inclusion of human rights in the curriculum through a specific unit of competence.