From Prevention to Wellness Through Group Work

Joan K Parry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317844785
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Offering some of the most advanced thinking and practice in the arena of social work with groups, From Prevention to Wellness Through Group Work synthesizes the discussions and findings from the Annual Symposium of the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups (AASWG). Gathered here are different ideas, techniques, and research (with a focus on prevention) for group work with seniors, adults, teens, and children. With a mix of authors from social work academia and practice, this book gives you groundbreaking theoretical pieces as well as emerging skills and techniques in group work. If you attended the conference you will refer to this book as a guide to the information presented. If you were not in attendance you need this book to discover what you missed!The two primary chapters in From Prevention to Wellness Through Group Work provide a look into constructivism and the power model and the empowerment approach as a paradigm for international social work practice. Other pertinent topics you learn about include:

• conflict management in group treatment
• a social skills program for emotionally disturbed children
• bullying and scapegoating in groups
• groups for persons who have experienced transplants
• groups for persons with AIDS
• the intersection of different realities in the group setting
• using poetry to revive traditional practice methods, theories, and values
• mutual aid, democratic participation, power sharing, and consciousness raisingFrom Prevention to Wellness Through Group Work also shows you how group experiences prevent breakdown and encourage wellness for older adults in senior centers and retirement communities; the definition, scope, and usefulness of psychoeducational groups; how group-based methods can enrich research; and how monitoring group practice can strengthen your effectiveness and credibility. You'll find the book's consistent focus on prevention while providing ways to improve both group work practice and research through cooperative efforts most helpful.

Chapter 1

Constructivism, Power, and Social Work with Groups

Gale Goldberg-Wood
Ruth R. Middleman

The title of this chapter, “Constructivism, Power, and Social Work with Groups,” is a mouthful. Constructivism—how one interprets, or makes sense of the world—and the dynamics of power—how persons replicate in the small group the power relations that go on elsewhere, in other contexts-are two sets of ideas that, when taken together, have important implications for doing social work with groups.

Consider constructivism through the following illustration:

Chicken Little thought the sky was falling. A piece of it had landed on her head. And she quickly went to inform Goosey-Lucy, Henny-Penny, Ducky-Lucky, Turkey-Lurkey and her other friends in the barnyard. She wanted to warn them; to tell them they should run for their lives. (Kellogg, 1985)

This was Chicken Little’s reality; this is what she knew. If we had been there, we might have seen that what fell on her head was an acorn. Our reality would have been different from hers. As well, had there been a giggling child with a pea shooter high up in the branches of a tree and proud of his aim, his reality might have been different from Chicken Little’s and from ours. There are many realities. The view depends not merely on the point of view, but on the point of viewer. Ideas of this sort are gaining acceptance across many disciplines under the rubric constructivism.

Constructivism suggests that all persons make their own realities. Even twins create different realities unique to each. These realities spring from what people have experienced and become the screens through which they see the world—their perspectives, their frames of reference. One’s perspective provides a general orientation of prearranged ideas, attitudes, and expectations that keep one’s world in order. It determines what has meaning and value, how much openness and difference one can entertain, and what must be ignored or transformed because it does not fit with one’s expectations and system of beliefs. So constructivism has implications for the understanding derived by group workers of group participants’ communications with each other as well as with themselves. It affects the practitioner’s thoughts about what is going on in the world of the group.

Constructivism puts the self of the constructor into all that she or he sees and experiences. It says something about the how of perception and about the constructor’s frame of reference—other concepts that have been used to explore matters of thinking. It is an epistemology, an approach to considering how one knows what one knows, by what means one knows it, and also what counts as real knowledge. For example, in Japan, many businessmen now reserve the term knowledge for only hunches, skills, and insights. The rest they consider mere information (The Economist, 1995). People in the United States still see and value information as important knowledge, as many introductory courses in academia reveal.

Meaning and how one translates seeing and experiencing into knowing is at the heart of constructivism. But we do not see through pristine eyes. The lenses of our eyes are smudged with history, spotted with personal and cultural experience, and some of our lenses are deeply scarred by our subordinate status in the socio-political realm (Swigonski, 1993). This applies not only to people of color and the elderly in a white, youth-valuing patriarchy, but can also be applied to social work among the professions, and to group work within social work. Again, the view depends not merely on the point of view, but on the point of the viewer. Interpretation, or the meaning given to perceived events, comes from the “I” behind the eye. And that “I” has been misled by many forces. Certain things are remembered, others are forgotten. Davies (1995), an historian, describes several categories of selectivity that affect what we think we “know”:

• Propaganda—the deliberate techniques of emphasizing only particular “facts”

• Geographical selectivity or parochialism—the way in which national self-interest determines the report of events (for example, the history of war as written by the victors)

• Stereotypes—the lumping together of varieties of individuals and describing them collectively, usually negatively

• Selective statistics—the use of numbers that will support one’s favored perspective over others’

• Professionals’ biases—the way different specialties or theories direct diverse conclusions

• Moral selectivity—the promotion of programs or actions that justify what one believes is “good”

Davies cautioned that selectivity is unavoidable, and one should admit this to oneself. Constructivism helps us own our human limitations and reminds us that we all call our own biased seeing and knowing “reality,” as if there are no alternate realities with as much credence as our own. We must learn that there are many realities, and that nothing is as certain as we think it is. Nothing is as certain as uncertainty.

Yet, as has been stated in social work literature, “… clinicians often assume a stance of certainty … a belief that they actually know what a client is experiencing in the particular context of his or her life” (Pozatek, 1994, p. 396). No doubt they do this under the constant pressure to make judgments and act on them. This pressure is even greater for persons who work with groups, since there are so many realities at work in any group session! It has been said that convergence of these multiple realities enables group formation (Shapiro, 1990), but the process is dauntingly complex; while learning may take place, and ways to make multiperspectival decisions can be created and used to advantage for all, convergence is at best approximate.

An event becomes an experience when it is given meaning and therefore interpretation. Meaning is confirmed, confounded, contradicted, or compromised through talk with others. This is how social reality is created. One’s known reality arises through participation in a family, group, neighborhood, school, church, workplace-that is, through one’s culture. It is perpetuated and extended by the ubiquitous, conspicuous media of today’s world. In all instances there is a group exerting influence on its members’ beliefs about what is real. Social reality is actively created and perpetuated in groups, and it is more subtly influenced by movies, television programming, advertizing, computer games, the Internet, and most especially, by one’s language.

LANGUAGE

We express our ideas through language. At the same time, our language limits what we can think about, how we can think about it, and what we can say to each other. Common sense might suggest that people thought up different words in order to express their ideas about the world and about themselves in it. However, 40 years ago the great contribution of the linguist Benjamin Whorf (1956) was the insight that the language we have at our command influences the very thoughts we can have, and thus the actions we can take.

From his extensive study of American Indian tongues, Whorf concluded that speakers of a language agree to perceive and think about the world in a certain way, though not the only possible way. This pertains to professional language with its special jargon as well. Each language embodies and perpetuates a particular culture’s worldview and determines the kinds of thoughts people of that culture can entertain. For example, our country thinks a lot about war. Its influence is insidious, pervasive, and unrelenting. As a result, our language has a lot of war-related words. Consider the following: the Salvation Army, the Peace Corps, the Childrens’ Defense Fund; we battle discrimination, kill a bill, attack problems, fight AIDS, deploy personpower, wipe out, conquer, combat, zero in on, induct, debrief, and discharge. In other cultures, such as Japan, the concept of war is greatly muted, a concept not available for use in thinking.

In The Power of Words, Chase (cited in Hayakawa, 1963) claims that our Indo-European language heritage produces a two-valued orientation: this or that, right or wrong, good or bad, which leads us to think in dichotomies. Something either is or is not, with little room for ranges of “is-ness.” Such dichotomous thinking, by relying on contrasts, obscures ambiguity as well as intermediate possibilities, and thereby limits understanding and other possible action (Berlin, 1990). Language, with its powerful limitations on thinking, complicates efforts to exchange ideas and makes it even harder for people to understand each other’s realities. Efforts to understand difference have always been a familiar challenge to those who work with groups—whether the difference is class, race, age, or gender.

POWER

It is power that determines what is real and attended to, what is emphasized rather than discounted, and what is ultimately silenced and ignored. “What is taken for ‘the truth’ depends primarily on social factors such as power, social negotiation and prestige” (Gergen, 1991, p. 93). Constructivism can shed light on power and its ramifications.

According to Breton (1994), power is the right to say and have a say. Power is also the right to categorize and name things, to “call the shots” (Luepnitz, 1988). Power is having the political and economic clout to promote one’s own preferred version of reality, the version of reality that benefits and keeps those in power in power. They get to decide, for example, what children are taught in the schools and what they are not taught; or what is and is not preached from the pulpits. Power is distributed by social class and guarded by like-minded class-mates. And according to Newsweek (1995), a new class seems to be emerging with its own values and preferences—a monied, merit-oriented overclass, rapidly drawing in yesteryear’s Yuppies. Newsweek, by naming the overclass, confirms it as a reality.

Power also involves the creation of specialized disciplines and practices, each with its regime of power and truth within which matters of what is acceptable and what is extraneous are determined (Foucault, 1980). Those who control what counts as knowledge, such as journal editors, are a good example. As a recent editor of Social Work said,

… every time an article is accepted or rejected, the editors make an epistemological decision that not only is part of the process of defining the profession and its truth, but also has political implications in the distribution of intellectual leadership, power and status … (Hartman, 1990, p. 3)

Let us note that there is rarely an article on group work in Social Work. Perhaps this precipitated the creation of our journal, Social Work with Groups, and perhaps helped precipitate the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups (AASWG) itself, and the yearly Symposia—three places where our professional voices could be expressed. In this organization, as well, journal editors and Symposia sponsors determine whose group work matters and should be promulgated and whose will be ignored; that is, who will be the intellectual leaders in group work.

Power is present in all social living. It is inequitably distributed such that some have more power than others. This is true both outside and inside the group. Power becomes an issue for groups when oppressive behavior learned outside the group is used inside the group, and when new and different ways of thinking and being, created through the group process, are maintained and even spread outside the group.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

Four ideas for practice emerge from understanding aspects of constructivism and some of the dynamics of power: (1) multilogue, (2) turntaking as a technique for decision making, (3) subtle oppression in the group, and (4) the need for consciousness raising.

MULTILOGUE

Dialogue is a very familiar concept these days. Careful attention to the original meaning of the term “dialogue” however, reveals its two-person nature. For group work, we propose the concept multilogue. Multilogue, unlike dialogue, involves many people. It is a process, attended to by the worker, through which group members develop shared meanings. Through multilogue, group participants talk to each other about how to understand events that occur in the group and elsewhere, and how to react to them. They do this primarily through talking; however, there is nonverbal agreement and disagreement as well. Through the multilogue process, multiple, individual meanings merge, forming the socially constructed realities of that particular group. This is what makes groups powerful. Through multilogue, groups define a social reality, and therefore the meaning of experience, by developing group norms regarding how particular events are to be construed and by expecting adherence to those norms. One reason support groups are so successful is because people believe and are encouraged to believe in their created, shared realities.

Multilogue involves contributions from virtually everyone present. It is not a serial dialogue between the worker and individual members while the rest look on. This latter communication pattern is what Kurland and Salmon (1992) refer to as casework in a group rather than group work. To be called group work, the primary interaction ought to be among the members.

In discussing and determining what is happening in the group, some participants speak louder than others. Some talk more often than others. Some are quiet. It is a challenge to the worker to facilitate the expressiveness of the whole group. This is best accomplished by encouraging as many persons as possible to have their say, despite the presence of dominant persons. This is especially important since we live in a cultural environment that encourages survival of the loudest. Dominance prevails if not deliberately interrupted, and the worker who supports and encourages multilogue is more likely to interrupt dominant voices, to tune in on the pulse of the whole group, and to be less likely to dominate the group.

DECISION MAKING/TURNTAKING

Through multilogue, the business of the small, face-to-face group is transacted. A crucial part of these transactions involves decision making. The most common way that groups make decisions is by voting and majority rule. This form of decision making is learned in the culture-at-large and is then transported into the small group. Sometimes, however, such know-how is not used. Gitterman’s (1989) work with a group of teens is illustrative. Chaos prevailed in the group until he introduced a three-part communication and decisionmaking structure: round robin to get the ideas out, group discussion of the ideas, then voting.

Even though majority rule and voting are the primary ways for making decisions in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Constructivism, Power, and Social Work with Groups
• Chapter 2. The Empowerment Group: The Heart of the Empowerment Approach and an Antidote to Injustice
• Chapter 3. Groups for the Socialization to Old Age
• Chapter 4. Psychoeducational Groups: A Model for Recovery and Celebration of the Self
• Chapter 5. Conflict Management in Group Treatment: “Get Out of My Face, You S.O.B.!”
• Chapter 6. Research and Groups: A Mutual Aid System?
• Chapter 7. Bullying and Scapegoating in Groups: Process and Interventions
• Chapter 8. Helping Long-Term Homeless Men Regain Their Personhood Through Social Group Work
• Chapter 9. Developing Social Skills Programs for Children with Emotional Disabilities
• Chapter 10. Group Work Education and the CSWE Curriculum Policy Statement: Capitulation or Coexistence?
• Chapter 11. A Self-Directed Community Group for Homeless People: Poetry in Motion
• Chapter 12. Social Group Work with the Elderly Mentally Ill: Beauty in the Beast
• Chapter 13. Refiguring Group-Work Services with People with AIDS
• Chapter 14. Post-Transplant Group … Five Years On
• Index