The Role of Social Workers' Religious Beliefs in Helping Family Members Forgive

Practice experience suggests that forgiveness can strengthen family relationships and bring about social, psychological, and, for some, spiritual healing. This article presents a study from the first known quantitative investigation of social workers' attitude toward, theory of, and use of forgiveness in the clinical setting. Data were gathered from a sample of social workers, primarily testing the differences between a group of strongly religious practitioners and those with less religious conviction on five theoretical constructs: forgiveness attitude, forgiveness techniques, forgiveness and depression, forgiveness and anger, and religious openness. Although it was hypothesized that religious social workers would show favorable differences on all theoretical variables tested, they differed from less religious social workers only on attitude toward forgiveness. Several possible explanations for the findings are offered.