published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

Recurrent themes identified in the narratives of the research participants revealed their perceptions and experiences of the diverse forms of power in this setting, their understanding and interpretation of the meaning of empowerment, and the building of foundations for effective empowering practices. The research findings show how practitioners enhance their own reflexivity as well as those of service partners and users to create a favorable learning environment. They challenged the dominant discourses and produced alternative ones, thus enriching the meaning of education. They also engaged in different dimensions of empowerment, namely (1) the personal dimension as how service users recaptured a sense of competence to meet life challenges and fight for their own benefits; (2) the interpersonal dimension as how practitioners collaborated with school personnel to safeguard student rights and secure social justice; (3) the school and community dimensions as how practitioners initiated positive changes to school policies and mobilized community resources for student development; and (4) the institutional dimension as how practitioners played the advocacy role in the education sector. / The findings provide a knowledge base for an understanding of the significant aspects of power and empowerment in school social work service. The recommendations induced are put into policy, practice, and research categories. They serve as useful information for policy makers to revisit the existing school social work policy to improve the working conditions of practitioners. They give valuable reference materials for youth workers to apply the empowerment approach in actual practice. They also stimulate other intellectuals to explore future directions of social work research in general, as well as youth and school social work studies in particular. / The research findings suggest that empowerment can be generated through a number of ways and understood in terms of dialogical process, reflexive practice, discourse construction, localized actions, collective actions and multiple interventions. The synthesis of these domains opens up the possibility for developing a framework of empowerment-oriented school social work practice. This framework provides a "map" to guide practitioners to work with power in diverse, dynamic, creative, and contextual ways. / This thesis examines the field experiences of Hong Kong school social workers in encountering different forms of power and carrying out empowering practices. A critical social work perspective is adopted to theorize a conceptual framework to explicate the narratives collected through in-depth interviews with 15 frontline school social workers. These research participants were chosen with regard to their service experience, the agencies they belonged to, and the types of schools they served. Using discourse analysis as the research strategy adds a power and political dimension in analyzing their narratives in the Hong Kong context. It gives a comprehensive and detailed description of their reactions to the power relations, performances of flexible roles, generation of new discourses, and use of various strategies to initiate empowering practices. / To Su Ming. / "August 2006." / Adviser: Steven Sek-yum Ngai. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: A, page: 1163. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 416-452). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.