Megan E . Gandy
Dr. Megan E. Gandy is an Associate Professor and BSW Program Director with the School of Social Work at West Virginia University. She graduated with her Ph.D. from the School of Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her substantive area of interest is the well-being of LGBTQQAI populations, focusing primarily on mental health and service use, faith communities and social support, and social justice issues. Her dissertation research, titled “Assessing LGBTQ Youth Cultural Competency in Direct-Care Behavioral Health Workers: Development and Validation of a Measure,” involved the creation of a measurement tool to assess LGBTQ-related cultural competency in paraprofessional workers who provide mental health services to children and adolescents. The measure can be found in her 2018 publication titled "The Queer Youth Cultural Competency (QYCC) scale: Measuring competency in direct-care behavioral health workers."
Dr. Gandy holds a Master of Social Work degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, NC. She has over 6 years of clinical experience with children, adolescents, and adults in service settings such as inpatient psychiatric hospitalization, in-home intensive therapy, case management, and group home care, and has an LCSW credential in North Carolina. She has worked with persons who suffer from serious mental illness, as well as co-occurring issues involving either a developmental disability, substance use disorder, or both.
Dr. Gandy is passionate about addressing the quality of care for LGBTQ youth in behavioral health treatment. She also has a pedagogical interest in LGBTQ issues and taught an MSW-level elective that she developed about micro and macro social work practice with LGBTQ persons. In addition to these specific areas of interest, she is also interested in the role that faith communities play in the lives of LGBTQ persons.
Dr. Gandy's teaching philosophy uses a student-centered approach and incorporates aspects of transformative learning informed by transformational pedagogy and theories on adult learning. She approaches students not as a “sage on the stage” but rather as a “guide on the side.” This approach has led to success in engaging students on key learning objectives. Dr. Gandy believes that students must be pushed to consider many alternatives rather than assuming the status quo and her emphasis on critical thinking parallels her attention to social justice issues in both teaching and research. Also, she is very comfortable with emerging technologies, and integrates technology into her teaching formats when appropriate.
Dr. Gandy is also interested in research and teaching in the mental health services field. She has research experience and publications on the topics of co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders among adults, service engagement of clients in programs of Assertive Community Treatment, and social supports during re-entry into the community for clients being discharged from residential substance abuse treatment programs. An article that she co-authored is currently in press in the peer-reviewed journal Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research , titled “Trends in Hospital Discharges and Dispositions for Episodes of Co-occurring Severe Mental Illness and Substance Use Disorders.” Her practice experience in several clinical settings combined with her research in this area provide her with rich material to use in the classroom.
Dr. Gandy is interested in the innovative use of technology in professional social work practice, research, and education. She writes a blog on this topic which can be accessed at http://techsocialwork.blogspot.com. She also manages a Twitter account dedicated to topics around LGBTQ persons, and ways that professional social work efforts can help bring justice to that population, and can be found at @LGBTQsocialwork and #LGBTQsocialwork.
Dr. Gandy holds a Master of Social Work degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, NC. She has over 6 years of clinical experience with children, adolescents, and adults in service settings such as inpatient psychiatric hospitalization, in-home intensive therapy, case management, and group home care, and has an LCSW credential in North Carolina. She has worked with persons who suffer from serious mental illness, as well as co-occurring issues involving either a developmental disability, substance use disorder, or both.
Dr. Gandy is passionate about addressing the quality of care for LGBTQ youth in behavioral health treatment. She also has a pedagogical interest in LGBTQ issues and taught an MSW-level elective that she developed about micro and macro social work practice with LGBTQ persons. In addition to these specific areas of interest, she is also interested in the role that faith communities play in the lives of LGBTQ persons.
Dr. Gandy's teaching philosophy uses a student-centered approach and incorporates aspects of transformative learning informed by transformational pedagogy and theories on adult learning. She approaches students not as a “sage on the stage” but rather as a “guide on the side.” This approach has led to success in engaging students on key learning objectives. Dr. Gandy believes that students must be pushed to consider many alternatives rather than assuming the status quo and her emphasis on critical thinking parallels her attention to social justice issues in both teaching and research. Also, she is very comfortable with emerging technologies, and integrates technology into her teaching formats when appropriate.
Dr. Gandy is also interested in research and teaching in the mental health services field. She has research experience and publications on the topics of co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders among adults, service engagement of clients in programs of Assertive Community Treatment, and social supports during re-entry into the community for clients being discharged from residential substance abuse treatment programs. An article that she co-authored is currently in press in the peer-reviewed journal Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research , titled “Trends in Hospital Discharges and Dispositions for Episodes of Co-occurring Severe Mental Illness and Substance Use Disorders.” Her practice experience in several clinical settings combined with her research in this area provide her with rich material to use in the classroom.
Dr. Gandy is interested in the innovative use of technology in professional social work practice, research, and education. She writes a blog on this topic which can be accessed at http://techsocialwork.blogspot.com. She also manages a Twitter account dedicated to topics around LGBTQ persons, and ways that professional social work efforts can help bring justice to that population, and can be found at @LGBTQsocialwork and #LGBTQsocialwork.
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sample of twelve clinical staff from a Program of Assertive
Community Treatment (PACT) team in central Virginia to
understand the perceptions and experiences related to
assertive engagement. The researchers coded the transcribed
data initially as twenty-three sub-themes and further
refined the data into four overarching themes:
characteristics of assertive engagement, PACT engagement
strategies and engagement strategies for difficult to engage
clients. Further analysis emphasized that PACT team
members emphasized the importance of the therapeutic
relationship for engagement, which proves challenging for
hard-to-engage clients.
In order for direct-care workers to use LGBTQ cultural competency in their practice, more understanding is needed about their current level of LGBTQ-related cultural competency. The LGBTQ Youth Cultural Competency scale (abbreviated as LGBTQY-CC) provides a means to measure those competencies. An exploratory factor analysis found that the new scale consists of one primary factor which represents knowledge, attitudes, skill, and awareness of LGBTQ cultural competency. Cronbach’s alpha, correlations with other measures for concurrent validity, and correlation with a measure of social desirability all resulted in evidence that the LGBTQY-CC has good validity.
Analyses examined how the new measure was related to constructs associated with training and competency in direct-care workers. Multiple regression analyses showed that higher levels of LGBTQ cultural competency (as measured by the LGBTQY-CC) were significantly related to age (younger), political ideology (more liberal), more social contact with LGBTQ individuals, and degree of religious belief about LGBTQ being a sin. A model including these factors explained 60% of the variance in LGBTQY-CC scores.
The LGBTQY-CC was created with the long-term goal of creating training interventions for direct-care workers to improve their practice with LGBTQ youth. The measure could be used to assess training participants’ knowledge, attitudes, skills, and awareness and to evaluate the effectiveness of varying types and styles of training programs. Federal and state regulatory bodies have begun to require service providers to identify how they will address disparities faced by LGBTQ individuals, so service providers need to demonstrate how they are improving access to and quality of care for LGBTQ individuals. Therefore, the LGBTQY-CC may provide a means to gather data on efforts made by service providers to improve their behavioral health workforce’s capacity to serve LGBTQ youth.
toward LGBTQ youth in an agency setting (n = 100) using the
Homonegativity Scale, the Personal Comfort Assessment Tool, and the Gay Affirmative Practice Scale. The results of this study indicate that job category is associated with mental health agency employees’ attitudes toward LGBTQ youth. Most notably, respondents from the Management/Supervisory category reported less homonegative attitudes toward LGBTQ youth than respondents from the Administrative/Clerical/Support job category. A post hoc regression analysis revealed that homonegative attitudes predict gay affirmative practice for this sample. Implications for policy and practice are explored.
DOI:10.1080/0886571X.2013.813344
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sample of twelve clinical staff from a Program of Assertive
Community Treatment (PACT) team in central Virginia to
understand the perceptions and experiences related to
assertive engagement. The researchers coded the transcribed
data initially as twenty-three sub-themes and further
refined the data into four overarching themes:
characteristics of assertive engagement, PACT engagement
strategies and engagement strategies for difficult to engage
clients. Further analysis emphasized that PACT team
members emphasized the importance of the therapeutic
relationship for engagement, which proves challenging for
hard-to-engage clients.
In order for direct-care workers to use LGBTQ cultural competency in their practice, more understanding is needed about their current level of LGBTQ-related cultural competency. The LGBTQ Youth Cultural Competency scale (abbreviated as LGBTQY-CC) provides a means to measure those competencies. An exploratory factor analysis found that the new scale consists of one primary factor which represents knowledge, attitudes, skill, and awareness of LGBTQ cultural competency. Cronbach’s alpha, correlations with other measures for concurrent validity, and correlation with a measure of social desirability all resulted in evidence that the LGBTQY-CC has good validity.
Analyses examined how the new measure was related to constructs associated with training and competency in direct-care workers. Multiple regression analyses showed that higher levels of LGBTQ cultural competency (as measured by the LGBTQY-CC) were significantly related to age (younger), political ideology (more liberal), more social contact with LGBTQ individuals, and degree of religious belief about LGBTQ being a sin. A model including these factors explained 60% of the variance in LGBTQY-CC scores.
The LGBTQY-CC was created with the long-term goal of creating training interventions for direct-care workers to improve their practice with LGBTQ youth. The measure could be used to assess training participants’ knowledge, attitudes, skills, and awareness and to evaluate the effectiveness of varying types and styles of training programs. Federal and state regulatory bodies have begun to require service providers to identify how they will address disparities faced by LGBTQ individuals, so service providers need to demonstrate how they are improving access to and quality of care for LGBTQ individuals. Therefore, the LGBTQY-CC may provide a means to gather data on efforts made by service providers to improve their behavioral health workforce’s capacity to serve LGBTQ youth.
toward LGBTQ youth in an agency setting (n = 100) using the
Homonegativity Scale, the Personal Comfort Assessment Tool, and the Gay Affirmative Practice Scale. The results of this study indicate that job category is associated with mental health agency employees’ attitudes toward LGBTQ youth. Most notably, respondents from the Management/Supervisory category reported less homonegative attitudes toward LGBTQ youth than respondents from the Administrative/Clerical/Support job category. A post hoc regression analysis revealed that homonegative attitudes predict gay affirmative practice for this sample. Implications for policy and practice are explored.
DOI:10.1080/0886571X.2013.813344