Faculty Voices: Michelle Putnam on Social Service and Aging Populations

Dr. Michelle Putnam is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research for the Simmons School of Social Work.  Dr. Putnam’s research focuses on the intersection of age and disability. She works closely with public programs and examines their capacity to serve the aging and disability population. Dr. Putnam is one of the few scholars in the field of social work studying aging with disability and is recognized for her leadership in this area. She has actively worked to build awareness of the distinctions between aging with long-term disability and incurring disability for the first time in later life as it relates to provision of supports and services and the overall experience of aging.

We sat down with Michelle to discuss her work in gerontological social work, her research, and her professional experiences. The following is a full transcript of our conversation.

Tell us a little bit about your experience with Simmons College. How long have you been working as part of our faculty?

This is my eighth year at the Simmons School of Social Work (SSW). I came to Simmons after working for several years at a large university in Missouri. Boston and New England were new to me — as was Simmons College — I hadn’t heard much about it. After eight years, I can say that one of the comments about Simmons I often make to colleagues is that it is a family-friendly academic environment — which can be hard to find. My SSW colleagues definitely appreciate high quality work and a solid work ethic, but they also know that we all have multiple roles as parents, siblings, care providers, friends, and community members that are important as well. Obligations and responsibilities associated with those roles are respected. That’s important.

Can you shed some light on your research on aging with a disability? What have you found needs more attention in terms of public policy as it relates to aging populations?

My scholarship is focused on people aging with long-term disabilities and the intersection of aging and disability. Under that umbrella, I study a lot of different things, but all of them are related to public policy. I look at how well policy addresses the needs of people with long-term disabilities, how policies are constructed, the implications of using age to bifurcate social welfare policies (e.g. segmenting policies for people ages 18 to 64 and for people ages 65 and older), and how well our public policies match with our theories of aging and disability — how theory can shape policy and vice versa.

I spend a lot of time focusing on long-term services and support for people with disabilities, but I also do work in the areas of economic equality and asset building. In general I’ve found that the entire area of aging with disabilities needs attention from all audiences — the number of researchers in this area is relatively small. I am one of the few scholars in the U.S. working in this area who focuses on public policy in any discipline, certainly one of the very few in the social work field. This makes me a specialist in may ways, but I’d rather not be one. I’d rather more researchers had this interest. The difficulty is it requires knowledge across fields — aging and disability — that is hard to come by unless you are purposefully trying to acquire it.

Based on your experience, what are the emerging career opportunities for new social workers looking to pursue a career with a gerontological specialization? 

There are so many opportunities to be a gerontological social worker. And so many settings to do it in. Of course there are positions in hospitals, institutions like skilled nursing facilities, and care services like hospice, but there are many more in the community ranging from civic engagement and volunteer organizations to aging services focused on health promotion, caregiving, and care coordination. I think the most important aspect for new graduates is to just get started in the field. The opportunities for advancement are good, and the work is quite varied and rewarding.

What is the Bridging Aging and Disability International Network? Tell us a bit about the work of this network.

This is an international research and knowledge translation working group that I co-direct with Andria Spinel, the CEO of March of Dimes Canada. It is focused on creating awareness of the need to bridge the fields of aging and disability, on developing foundational scholarship in this area, on mentoring new scholars, and on translating existing knowledge for practice and policy professionals as well as individuals with disabilities and their families. The BADIN website is being developed this year as is our training institute. To date we have published a special issue in the International Journal of Integrated Care and our members have presented our policy statement to audiences around the world — including agencies in the U.S. federal government, the provincial government of Ontario, Canada, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

If you could give any piece of advice to a social work student pursuing their MSW, what would it be?

Study. The MSW program is only two years long. This may seem like forever, but it’s not. The time passes quickly, and students have many demands on their time. Our MSW students spend a lot of their time in field placements with real clients — and this is an incredibly compelling learning space. That said, MSW courses are equally important and investing in your studies — reading, putting conscious effort into assignments, engaging in discussion, trying out new ideas, opening your mind to learning new things — is critical to understanding what you’re seeing in the field. The MSW program teaches important thinking skills that students need to master to do their best work as practice professionals. There is no short cut to this mastery, so study!