Profiles in Social Work

Bringing Real World Experience to Social Work Education
Carmen Morano, PhD, MSW

Since joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Social Work in 2000, Carmen Morano, PhD, MSW, says he has been happier than ever before. Teaching affords him the opportunity to bring practical wisdom, gained over a 25-year career in social work, to the classroom. He also does research in subject areas that proved challenging during his career in the field, especially stress and coping processes among Alzheimer's disease caregivers.

"I'm looking into the reasons why some people do very well and others seem to end up with depression when coping with similar types of stress," he says. "I was initially trying to identify factors that could predict how a person would react to the stress of being a caregiver." Some of those factors turned out to be socio-economic status, race, and ethnicity, as well as the demands of other roles outside of caregiving. "People who have other roles are going to have worse outcomes," Morano explains.

Morano's move from the field to a university is only the latest in a career that has been full of surprising twists and turns. He didn't start out as a social worker. "I first worked in sales," he says, "but I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I had friends who were in social work, and the field seemed attractive, so I went back to school at 30 and got my masters. It was definitely an altruistic attraction-it was much better helping people than seeing how much I could sell to them."

A large number of social workers in Florida were going into clinical work in the late 70's. The population there was aging faster than that of the rest of the country, and to Morano, the problems of older adults seemed more complicated. They required more care from medical and support personnel, for example, but no one was helping them gather all of these resources together. "I realized that there was fragmentation going on," he says, "so my wife and I moved into geriatric care management. I was able to provide an objective assessment of what was happening with the older adults. Then I used my social work skills to help their families understand that coping with change is difficult for all people, but even more so for older adults. It requires a process."

To support that process, Morano would typically identify a family's needs, prioritize them, and then decide which available solutions were realistic and practical, given a family's finances and the particular strengths and weaknesses of the older adults and their children. "The long-term reality is that older adults can spend 15 or 20 years struggling with certain problems, so getting involved early and being more proactive is important."

What initially brought Morano to academia was not the call of research. He and his wife, Barbara, also a social worker, had together built Florida Elder Watch into one of the largest geriatric care management companies in South Florida. As the firm expanded, he eventually needed to hire more social workers. He soon began to realize that recent university graduates were often lacking in the kind of practical savvy Geriatric Care Management required. He returned to school at Florida International University in 1996 to pursue a PhD in Social Welfare, which would afford him the opportunity to offer students the knowledge needed to effectively work with older adults and their families. After graduating he moved north in 2000 to accept a position at the University of Maryland, where he is now an assistant professor.

Morano has never regretted the move. "Being self-employed, while exciting and certainly profitable, was also stressful. I looked at my life plan, my own aging, and I realized that in an academic setting, I could take real world skills and teach them in the classroom."

His research into caregiver stress eventually led him to look more closely at minority subjects. Much of the literature published to date by colleagues focused on white, middle-class caregivers, so Morano saw a need to study other groups, especially Hispanic Americans and African Americans. They turned out to be more similar than dissimilar to each other, relying far more on family systems and extended kinship networks than on formal services such as daycare and respite programs often utilized by Caucasian Americans. This was due, in part, to limited available economic resources, but even more so to traditional cultural attitudes which considered older adults to be wise elders.

Today, Morano finds himself drawn into new areas of research, such as marital satisfaction among older couples. "Older couples are living longer now," he explains, "so instead of just having a limited time after retirement, they can have twenty or thirty more years together. We're finding issues sometimes emerge about how they communicate and help and support each other. We're also looking at ways in which new medications such as Viagra and Cialis are affecting their sexuality."

Most recently Carmen has accepted a joint appointment to the Hunter College School of Social Work and the Brookdale Center on Aging. Wherever his new career may lead him, there is no doubt that he'll be happy to follow. "I probably work more hours than I've ever done, but there isn't that sense that someone's life is depending on my getting something accomplished in the next thirty minutes. So it's been very relaxing in some ways, and overwhelming in others. I'm loving it."

Posted on June 10, 2005

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