National Study of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Workers, Work, and Organizational Contexts, Research Report No. 3. Overview Study of Employment of Paraprofessionals.

This document has four major objectives: (1) to synthesize and summarize the relevant literature on the employment of paraprofessionals; (2) to present the insights and impressions gained from experiences in a limited field investigation; (3) to relate both the literature and the field investigation to a conceptual framework; and (4) to discuss the knowledge gained from the literature and the field experiences for its operational implications for managers and decision makers in the social welfare and rehabilitation services. A framework was used to organize the literature into five major sections--antecedents of the paraprofessional movement, a description of paraprofessional workers, their utilization, their assimilation into organizations, the consequences of employing them--and to develop concepts for constructing instruments for collecting data in the field.(Author/PC)