This study aims to classify latent profiles in human rights consciousness of pre-service social workers and to examine factors associated with profiles.
Based on the related theories on human rights development and literatures on human right educations, a research model was specified. The population of the study is junior students in the member schools of the Korean Council on Social Welfare Education, and a data from 927 respondents was used for the final analyses. Latent profile analyses were performed to empirically classify pre-service social workers into subgroups based on the indicators of human rights judgement, human rights sensitivity, and human rights behavioral intention. According to the analyses, pre-service social workers were classified into three latent groups: ‘high level group(15.3%)’, ‘average level group(56.7%)’, and ‘low level group(27.9%)’. The results from multivariate multinomial logistic regression analyses revealed that high levels of social work human rights exposure, human rights participatory activities, perspective taking, emotional concerns, self-regulatory efficacy and task difficulty preferences significantly increased the probability of being in the ‘high level group’. Also, high levels of perspective taking, emotional concerns, and self-regulatory efficacy increased likelihood of membership in the ‘average group’ instead of ‘low level group’. Based on the study findings, practical implications for the human rights educations for pre-service social workers were discussed.