The DOI matches its Crossref record; 30 of the 30 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Social Work in a Digital Age: Ethical and Risk Management Challenges
Abstract
Digital, online, and other electronic technology has transformed the nature of social work practice. Contemporary social workers can provide services to clients by using online counseling, telephone counseling, video counseling, cybertherapy (avatar therapy), self-guided Web-based interventions, electronic social networks, e-mail, and text messages. The introduction of diverse digital, online, and other forms of electronic social services has created a wide range of complex ethical and related risk management issues. This article provides an overview of current digital, online, and electronic social work services; identifies compelling ethical issues related to practitioner competence, client privacy and confidentiality, informed consent, conflicts of interest, boundaries and dual relationships, consultation and client referral, termination and interruption of services, documentation, and research evidence; and offers practical risk management strategies designed to protect clients and social workers. The author identifies relevant standards from the NASW Code of Ethics and other resources designed to guide practice.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Research Methods for Social Work
Rubin, A., & Babbie, E. R. (2006) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 1,854
Barak, A., Hen, L., Boniel-Nissim, M., & Shapira, N. (2008) · Journal of Technology in Human Services · doi:10.1080/15228830802094429 · Cited by 1,283
Informed Consent: Legal Theory and Clinical Practice
Appelbaum, P. S., Lidz, C. W., & Meisel, A. (1987) · eScholarship@UMassChan · Cited by 733
Ethics and Values in Social Work
Banks, S. (2012) · doi:10.1007/978-0-230-37592-5 · Cited by 583
Current and Future Trends in Internet-Supported Mental Health Interventions
Barak, A., & Grohol, J. M. (2011) · Journal of Technology in Human Services · doi:10.1080/15228835.2011.616939 · Cited by 373 · cited 4×
“Some practitioners have chosen to exchange text messages with clients informally, for example, when clients wish to cancel or reschedule an appointment or provide the social worker with a btief update duting a ctisis (Barak & Grohol, 2011; Zur, 2011).”
BackgroundInfluentialEthical decisions for social work practice
Dolgoff, R., Harrington, D., & Loewenberg, F. M. (1982) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 373
Reamer, F. (2018) · Columbia University Press eBooks · doi:10.7312/ream18828 · Cited by 366
Self-citationSocial Work Research and Evaluation: Foundations of Evidence-Based Practice
Grinnell, R. M., & Unrau, Y. A. (2010) · Cited by 364
Online counselling: A descriptive analysis of therapy services on the Internet
Chester, A., & Glass, C. A. (2006) · British Journal of Guidance & Counselling · doi:10.1080/03069880600583170 · Cited by 203
Best Practices in Online Therapy
Abbott, J.-A. M., Klein, B., & Ciechomski, L. (2008) · Journal of Technology in Human Services · doi:10.1080/15228830802097257 · Cited by 185
Research works printed but not linked: 6
- 2008, JOURNAL OF TECHNOLOGY IN HUMAN SERVICES, 26, 110
- 2006, JOURNAL OF TECHNOLOGY IN HUMAN SERVICES, 24, 1
- 2009, ANNUAL REVIEW OF CYBERTHERAPY AND TELEMEDICINE, 7, 108
- 2010, INDEPENDENT PRACTITIONER, 30, 140
- 2002, ADVANCES IN SOCIAL WORK, 3, 104, 10.18060/34 · doi:10.18060/34
- 2012, CALIFORNIA PSYCHOLOGIST, 45, 13
Cited by
Ethical Issues in Online Psychotherapy: A Narrative Review
Stoll, J., Müller, J. A., & Trachsel, M. (2020) · Frontiers in Psychiatry · doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00993 · Cited by 340
The ethical and clinical implications of utilizing cybercommunication in face-to-face therapy
Fantus, S., & Mishna, F. (2013) · Smith College Studies in Social Work · doi:10.1080/00377317.2013.833049 · Cited by 23
My Entire Life is Online: Informed Consent, Big Data, and Decolonial Knowledge
O'Connell, A. (2016) · Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice · doi:10.48336/ijbioj2019 · Cited by 5
Metadata
- Authors
- Reamer, F. G.
- Venue
- Social Work
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2013-03-24
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 163-172
- ISSN
- 0037-8046 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-6846
- OpenAlex
- W2132750226
- Cited by
- 334
- References
- 30
- FWCI
- 58.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Social Work in a Digital Age: Ethical and Risk Management Challenges. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/sw/swt003
- The paper
- Reamer, F. G. (2013). Social Work in a Digital Age: Ethical and Risk Management Challenges. Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swt003
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
