Differences between Bilingual and Non-Bilingual Msw Students on Skills, Attitudes, and Experiences of Interprofessional Education

Purpose

Given the deficit of mental health counselors and providers in the U.S. (HRSA, 2023), there is a need to examine workforce programs with MSW students focusing on healthcare inequities, knowledge of healthcare systems, and working on interdisciplinary teams (Herweh et al., 2025). Bilingual MSW students are a group of eventual social workers who warrant consideration regarding workforce development given their unique capacity to interact with diverse groups based on their linguistic abilities. This study examines a sample of MSW students (bilingual and non-bilingual), involved in a workforce development intervention program aimed at increasing behavioral health skills and competencies.

Methods

As part of the Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training program, students were recruited as part of a larger study (Herweh, 2025) to engage in federally funded health workforce development program at a School of Social Work in the Midwest. Bilingual and non-bilingual students from four cohorts that participated in the program from 2021-2025. Students participated in year long, 3-day medically focused internship for underserved communities and a semester-long course focusing on interprofessional education where they worked with nursing students. In the pretest/posttest group design, participants were asked to respond to items from the Attitudes Toward Health Care Teams Scale, Team Skills Scale, Inventory of Behavioral Health Competencies Survey, and Interprofessional Collaborative Competencies Attainment Survey (ICCAS), prior to and after involvement in the program. Along with descriptives, a series of ANCOVAs were run to examine differences on overall scores from each of the scales while controlling for bilingual status.

Results

Of the sample (N=132), 83.3% were female, 82.6% were White, and 23.5% were bilingual with an average age of approximately 31 years. For both groups, posttest scores on all scales were significantly higher than pretest scores. While posttest scores on all scales were higher than pretest scores, no differences existed between groups on any of the scales with the exception of the ICCAS (F(1,129)=5.55, p=.02, ƞ²=.04) where the bilingual group had a higher mean score (M=4.66) than the non-bilingual group (M=4.38). A series of ANCOVAs were then run to examine each item from the ICCAS with significant differences between groups on 11 of the 20 items.

Conclusions

Results indicated differences existed between bilingual and non-bilingual MSW students in relation to interprofessional competencies. Posttest scores for both groups were higher than pretest scores on all scales indicating the intervention programming likely had the intended effect. Future research should include additional factors such as age, prior knowledge of interprofessional collaboration, and prior exposure to interprofessional collaboration to better understand those mechanisms which help explain the differences between groups. Furthermore, findings indicate the need to consider social work educational opportunities for both bilingual and non-bilingual MSW students to maximize interprofessional collaboration and learning.