Master of Social Science (by dissertation) — Social Work postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The foster care files I carry on home visits each have a page at the back headed 'Contact log', where I record the date, who was present and what was discussed. Over two years as a community-based social worker with a child welfare organisation in the Cape Flats, I have filled many of these pages. Reading back through them recently, I noticed how often the same entry appeared: grandmother present, child at school, concerns raised about money before month-end. That pattern is the starting point for the research I hope to pursue through a Master of Social Science in Social Work by dissertation.

Most of my caseload involves kinship placements, usually grandmothers caring for grandchildren after a parent has died, moved for work or struggled with substance use. My role is supervising these placements, writing reports for children's court reviews and helping families keep their foster child grants in place. I am not a senior practitioner, and I depend on regular supervision from experienced colleagues, but the work has given me close, repeated contact with families across months rather than single encounters.

My interest in this group began during my Honours year. For my research project I interviewed eight grandmothers about applying for foster child grants, using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. The most consistent finding in that small sample was not hostility from officials but the cost of persistence: repeated taxi fares to offices, missing documents such as death certificates, and days spent queuing while younger children needed care. I was pleased that my supervisor considered the analysis careful and well organised, and the project taught me practical skills I still use, including obtaining informed consent in isAfrikaans and isiXhosa with an interpreter's help, and writing up findings without overstating what a small study can show.

What I want to examine now is narrower and more developed: how kinship carers manage the period around court-ordered placement extensions, when paperwork, social worker capacity and household budgets all come under pressure at once. South African debates about whether kinship care should continue to rely so heavily on the foster care system, rather than a simpler support route, are well known among practitioners, but I would like to understand how carers themselves experience the administrative side of that arrangement. A dissertation format suits me because it would allow sustained fieldwork and reading, and because my questions come from practice rather than from a gap I have only seen in the literature.

I have tried to prepare by reading more systematically. I have worked through texts on qualitative research design and returned to writing on ecological systems approaches, which helped me think about a grandmother's situation as shaped by the household, the welfare office and the courts together. I also keep a reflective journal, separate from case notes, which has made me more alert to my own assumptions as a younger, university-educated worker visiting older women's homes.

Not everything in my week is social work. On Saturdays I work at the till of a local pharmacy, a job I kept from my student years. It is routine, but it has made me comfortable talking with strangers in a hurry and patient when someone is worried about a prescription they cannot afford. I also sing alto in my church choir, which means Thursday rehearsals and learning parts I do not always like at first. Both commitments have made me reliable about time, something I will need when balancing research with ongoing obligations.

I know that research with vulnerable carers requires careful ethics, honest limits and respect for people who owe a researcher nothing. My practice experience has shown me how much time families give to systems that do not always repay it. I would like my dissertation to use participants' time well, and to produce findings that colleagues in organisations like mine could read, question and use.