In the context of the digital era, developing an expert consensus on “digital social work” will help to deepen and promote the understanding of digital transformation among social work educators, researchers, and practitioners. Through expert discussions, proposal writing, multiple rounds of feedback, and co-signing, this article reached a consensus on three key aspects: the definition, significance and challenges, and development recommendations for digital social work. The definition highlights the use of information and communication technology in social work, while also emphasizing the significant impacts and challenges which digital social work poses for service recipients, social workers, direct services, service organizations, education and training, and the profession itself. Lastly, the article provides recommendations for the future development of digital social work, including the co-construction of infrastructure, the development of service models, strengthening discipline-building, revising ethical standards, and creating theoretical frameworks.

In the era of artificial intelligence, advances in technology have significantly enhanced social productivity and efficiency, transferring much material or productive labor to machines or automated systems, while “immaterial labor” has become the primary form of human labor. Social work, as a form of immaterial labor, embodies dual values: creativity and emotionality, which are particularly important in the AI era. This paper explores the creative and emotional values of professional social work and analyzes its legitimacy and justification in the context of AI. This paper proposes four dimensions of AI-enabled social work: low creativity with high emotionality, high creativity with high emotionality, high creativity with low emotionality, and low creativity with low emotionality. The integration of AI and social work is an inevitable trend. By effectively integrating social work with AI, it is possible to achieve a complementary advantage between AI and social workers, promoting the liberation of both the form and substance of labor.

Community rehabilitation services are crucial for the well-being of disabled children and their families. Our survey of disabled children and community rehabilitation stations in LX reveals issues of insufficient service supply and a lack of diversity in service providers, hindering the fulfillment of the diverse needs of disabled children. Developmental social work emphasizes the coordinated development of economy and society. Community-based, empowering and advantageous approaches, and comprehensive interventions in social work are marking the transition from a clinical intervention paradigm to a developmental paradigm. The practical aspects of developmental social work are instrumental in restructuring the community rehabilitation service system for disabled children, forming a needs-oriented, community-based, and multi-provider-supported evaluation and classification service system for disabled children, which is of great significance for improving the rehabilitation assistance system for disabled children.

Through three iterations of social work practice courses, the method of educational action research is used to continuously refine the teaching content and explore ways to enhance students’ knowledge transformation. The findings suggest that students’ knowledge transformation is characterized by the strengthening of beliefs, the accumulation of practical experience, and the reconstruction of personal values. Students navigate various processes during their knowledge transformation, including addressing practice challenges, reflecting on their practices, engaging in discussions centered on practice, and developing practical guidelines. This process encompasses from activating and reconstructing theoretical knowledge to constructing and generating, externalizing and sharing, as well as internalizing and integrating practical knowledge. It also highlights the importance of establishing good relationships between participants in the educational setting to facilitate this transformation process.

Clarifying the research status, summarizing research hotspots, and identifying trends in social work practice research in China can provide valuable theoretical insights for the research and development of social work practice in China’s New Era. Using the literature visualization tool CiteSpace, this research examines 1,182 core literature in social work practice research from CSSCI journals between 1998 to 2023. The analysis encompasses the overview of the publications and the collaborative landscape among core authors and research institutions in this field. Keyword co-occurrence maps, cluster maps, and mutation word information maps are drawn to examine the hot topics and main themes in the field, as well as to predict future research trends. The findings indicate that social work practice research in China characterized by “high concentration and low dispersion”, highlighting the significant role played by core authors and research groups in this field; The primary focus of the field center around five modules: practical social work, professional construction, social governance, values and ethics, and theoretical foundations. It is predicted that future research will continue to contribute to rural revitalization strategies, ecological environment care, community governance community construction, government procurement of services, and grassroots governance. However, improvements are needed in several areas: the level of collaboration and diversity among authors and institutions need to be enhanced; further research on the integration of innovative technologies in social work practices is necessary; policy research related to practice needs to be further developed.

Residents’ organized participation in urban community public services can effectively address the challenges posed by disorderly and sporadic participation. This article explores factors that influence residents’ organized participation in urban community public service. Adopting constructivist grounded theory, this research identifies 11 factors, including subject value identification and subject participation ability. The 11 factors are then classified into three dimensions, including subject attributes, subject interaction channels, and service composition. By learning their interconnections, this research further reveals the mechanisms through which these influencing factors affect residents’ organized participation. The article further proposes that policy innovations are needed to promote residents’ organized participation in urban community public services through strengthening multiple subject participation forces based on subject attributes, constructing and developing channels for resident organized subject interaction, and enriching community public service types.

Community governance often encounters challenges such as fragmentation and the differentiation of subjects, which have significantly impede to the development of a cohesive community within primary-level social governance. The proposition of the “Wu She Liandong (linkages between community organizations)” mechanism has offered new avenues for resolving such problems. However, in practice, the phenomenon of “linked yet inactive” among community organizations persists in grassroots social governance, making it difficult for collaborative governance among multiple subjects to operate effectively. This article aims to understand the underlying mechanisms that contribute to this phenomenon. Adopting the grassroots social governance ecology and the grassroots social governance community as theoretical perspectives, through on-site investigations in X Street, Shanghai, this article discovers that the profound mechanism that molds the “Wu She Liandong Being Linked Yet Inactive” lies in the deficiency of ecological construction in grassroots social governance. Specifically, the organizational ecology, public welfare ecology, service ecology, and participation ecology in community governance have not been fostered, thereby failing the five sectors to form an organically integrated relationship, which restricts the modernization process and the exertion of the efficacy of grassroots social governance.

The floating elderlies (Lao piao zu) refers to the migrating elderlies who migrate to their children’s place to support their children and take care of their grandchildren. Drawing froms in-depth interviews with 15 representative cases of H community in Guangzhou, this study adopts the grounded theory approach and the ecosystem theory to identify factors that influence the elderly migrants’ self-worth through three-level coding. The influencing factors are categorized into five dimensions: physical fitness, life concept, family relationship, interpersonal relationship and social relations. Building on this foundation, professional social work methods are adopted at the micro level to improve the migrant elderlies’ sense of physical and psychological values by enhancing their learning ability, exercising their identity, and changing their irrational beliefs. At the meso-level, the focus is on strengthening migrant elderlies’ sense of family value and interpersonal value by reviewing the past and exploring their advantage potential. At the macro level, the aim is to enrich their social values by linking social resources and bolster social identity. These strategies are to enhance migrant elderlies’ self-worse and facilitate their better integration into urban life thus promote the harmonious development of the society.

Policy advocay is an essential aspect of macro social work. However, it represents a weak point in both the theory and practice of social work in our country.To illustrate this point, this study examines policy advocacy actions in juvenile judicial protection over the past two decades. It analyzes the localization path of social work policy advocacy, focusing on the actions of authoritative departments. The findings reveal that China’s social work policy advocacy differs significantly from practices in western traditions. In China, the authoritative department plays a leading role in the policy-making process. Therefore, there exists a strong alignment between the process of social work policy advocacy and the process of authoritative department policy-making. The policy-making process of the authoritative department develops along the trajectory from “vague to clarity”, with social work policy advocacy aligning closely to this process. In initial stage of generating vague policies, social work advocates policies through service lobbying and exploratory services. In the phase of ambiguous clarity, social work carries out policy advocacy through comprehensive services, institutional lobbying, and policy suggestions. In the stage of clear policy administration, social work carries out policy advocacy through policy suggestions, policy publicity, and standardized services.

In light of the ongoing relaxation of fertility policies, the fertility rate has not increased as anticipated and has even experienced a decline. Based on Coser’s social conflict theory, factor analysis is adopted to investigate the factors that influence the fertility intentions of youth of childbearing age. The findings reveal that the factors affecting the fertility intentions of youth of childbearing age are, in order of significance, institutional factors, conflict of interest between individuals and work-family resources, and conflict of fertility values. Notably, the inadequate livelihood security system, gender-based inequality within the employment system, and the insufficient housing security are the main institutional factors influencing the fertility intentions of youth of childbearing age. Conflict sof interests arise between individuals and their families, as well as between the families and their employing organizations. The conflict of perceptions manifest in the clash between the traditional and modern sconcept of reproduction, as well as in tensioins between the utilitarian and the emotional considerations regarding childbearing and childrearing. To improve the childbearing environment and increase the young people’s fertility intentions, the study advocates for the enhancement of the supportive childbearing and childrearing policies, the development of mechanisms to promotework-family balance.