Strength and Diversity in Social Work with Groups

Think Group

Carol S. Cohen, Michael H Phillips, Meredith Hanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780789037916
• eBook ISBN: 9781135694906
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

How can groups effectively meet the needs of humans in areas as diverse as aid, responsibility, action, healing, learning and acceptance? This edited volume aims to address these issues and provide ways to extend the current reach and quality of social work with groups.

Based on a selection of papers from the 24th Annual International Symposium of the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups (AASWG) the chosen chapters embody the strength and diversity of the Symposium, encouraging and encourage readers to "Think Group". Chapters address the future challenges faced in social work with groups, including issues in teaching group work, holistic thinking about groups, team-building, staff development programs and university-agency collaborations to strength group work practice. There are chapters focusing on how mutual aid groups support trauma recovery, including one with firemen addressing the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster, as well as chapters that examine group work's place in community development, challenging social isolation, mask making as a medium for growth, and special issues in addressing concerns of children and youth.

This book will be of interest to researchers, professionals and students in social work and human service fields.

1 Caught in the Doorway Between Education and Practice

Group Work’s Battle for Survival¹

Robert Salmon and Roselle Kurland

Ten years ago we presented a plenary paper at the Atlanta symposium of the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups titled Making Joyful Noise: Presenting, Promoting, and Portraying Group Work to and for the Profession. We started that presentation with a famous line from Shakespeare’s King Henry the Fifth, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead!” (1918, p. 40). The intent of Henry’s speech was to rouse his vastly outnumbered forces in the forthcoming battle with the French. The purpose of Henry’s speech was achieved: the English were successful. They survived. They won.

The analogy we made to Henry was intentional. Group work was—and is—a vastly outnumbered method minority in social work, and we were in an intense struggle to maintain social work with groups as a viable part of social work. Our paper discussed history, problems and issues, and presented ideas about what we needed to do to preserve it.

A decade has gone by since that presentation, an appropriate time to ask how have we done in the past ten years. In what direction is the profession moving? How has the method fared in education and in practice? How are new graduates with interest in group work received, and what problems do they face as new professionals?

To continue the analogy to Henry, we can say, with assuredness, that we have not won. The struggle for group work’s survival continues and our concern is that we are losing the battle. The profession and the method face even more serious issues than those they confronted ten years ago.

To understand the predicament in which group work and social work practitioners with particular interest in and commitment to group work find themselves, three areas need to be looked at. First, there is the lack of group work education in schools of social work and the implications for practice of that lack. Second, there are the ways in which research is currently being emphasized in our profession. And third, there are conditions, particularly funding requirements, in many agencies that militate against good group work practice.

The lack of group work education in schools of social work has been well documented (see, for example, Kurland & Salmon, 1996; Middleman, 1992; Parry, 1995). Very few social work schools offer more than one course in group work practice. Frequently, such courses are taught by teachers who, themselves, do not know social group work very well. The may teach work with groups but not social group work. A recent study (Strozier, 1997) found that even with the existence of many solid group work textbooks, by far the most used text in group work courses in schools of social work was Irvin Yalom’s The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. That is a fine book, certainly, but social group work and group psychotherapy are not synonymous.

The lack of group work education results in a premium being placed in practice on speed of group formation. When new workers say they need time for planning, to assess need, to get to know potential members, to give potential members a chance to get a sense of them, they are dismissed: “Oh, that’s the stuff you get in school. This is the real world. We don’t have time for that here.” How sad! The lack of group work education results in too many social workers who have never learned the connection between planning and meaningful, successful groups.

The lack of education also results in too many social workers who do not appreciate such crucial concepts as mutual aid, stages of group development and their implications for practice, the value and importance of conflict in a group (Steinberg, 1993), the use of activity, and the difference between group work and casework in a group (Kurland & Salmon, 1992). All these have been described elsewhere and so we will not dwell on them here.

The lack of group work education has also resulted in an abundance and every-growing number of curriculum-driven groups. These are not groups that have a suggested curriculum. They are not curriculum-based groups. Rather they are curriculum-DRIVEN groups with pre-set content that is to be applied without flexibility and according to a pre-determined timetable. They are called groups, but these are not social work groups. Perhaps they might be called classes, but actually they are not good classes either.

Communication in such groups is leader-directed with minimal interaction among group members. Member strengths and mutual aid are not elicited or emphasized. Leaders of such groups are instructed to stay with the curriculum, not to deviate from it even when a member wants to discuss a concern that is relevant but not on the agenda. “Sorry, we don’t have time for that. We need to move on.”

We believe that such groups have become increasingly popular because the group work understanding and skill that are needed to develop, guide, and utilize group process, and to maximize relationships and mutual aid among group members are just not being taught today. A set curriculum may be a way to overcome the deficit; it may even be comforting at first to the worker. But such curricula soon become counter-productive and stifling. They leave no room for innovation, for creativity, for individualization.

A few weeks ago, as classes were just beginning, a student in my group work class approached me to make sure that the group she would be leading was an acceptable part of her field work assignment. This student is an administration major with a minor in group work and, as such, is required to work with at least one group. She described a curriculum-driven group on parenting for women heads-of-households in the shelter where she worked. I made a face. She quickly picked up on that, “I’m doing another group,” she said. She described a residents’ council at the shelter that aims to empower residents and to enhance neighborliness among a diverse resident population (elderly men and women, single men and women with HIV or AIDS, women with young children). In describing this group, she demonstrated an effervescence that seemed absent in her description of the curriculum group. She was, herself, excited at the opportunities that this group provided for creative practice. My response to this alternative was enthusiastic. I made another face, the opposite of my first. She quickly responded, “My director thought that that group wouldn’t be acceptable, that it wouldn’t meet the requirements for school—that it had to be a group with a curriculum.” What is group work becoming?

Simultaneous with the rise of curriculum-driven groups has been the ascendancy of techniques to replace the group work method. We believe that this is also a direct result of the lack of social group work education. In New York City, for example, a “semi-profession”—that of Youth Worker—has been identified from which social work has been excluded or is, at best, a minimal part. The knowledge, understanding, and skill that social workers bring to work with youth are unrecognized. Youth workers are being used to staff the majority of the extensive Beacon School programs throughout the City. Though a great deal of their work is with children in groups, the training these youth workers receive for this job too often consists of techniques that are not rooted in principled understanding of group work practice. Similarly, other styles or what might be called “models” of practice with groups have arisen that reflect almost no knowledge of social group work.

What is taking place today is that a premium is being place on whatever works, on what have come to be called “best practices.” Though some of these best practices are good techniques that may even be quite creative, the lack of knowledge and understanding with which they are applied means that they are limited and one-dimensional. Harold Lewis said that techniques “are often attractive to those liking for facile solutions to difficult problems in uncertain situations” (1982, p. 167). But, Lewis added, they do not reflect the years of experience, experiment, discovery, and intervention that make up the knowledge, purpose, values, and professional sanction of a method of practice. Techniques are simply not enough. Yet the lack of group work education has resulted in practitioners who seem desperate to jump on any techniques that they are able to find.

The ascendance of research and the effects that arise present another problem that confronts our profession in general and group work in particular. Research is important. It has the potential to increase our knowledge of client needs and social situations, of practice interventions, and of program effectiveness. Perhaps even more importantly, it encourages us to discipline our thinking and to sharpen our decision-making acumen.

But research today is becoming too often not a way to learn but rather a way to prove. The rise of research has its roots in the halls of academia. It is being used today in a battle for professional status and prestige, to demonstrate to the academic bestowers of promotion and tenure that social workers are not “soft,” that their rigor is beyond question. To demonstrate that, a premium is being placed on quantitative research. Qualitative research is given a much less preferred standing.

Such an emphasis in academia has put the teaching of practice “on the back burner” in many schools of social work (Hartman, 1990). It has resulted in proposals to accept students into doctoral programs without a hiatus in their educational path to allow time for experience in direct practice (O’Neill, 2000). Such proposals would make the primary aim of doctoral education the production of skillful researchers who may have knowledge about practice, but who do not have knowledge gained through the experience of actual practice. Such proposals have enormous negative implications for the quality of the teaching of practice in our schools.

With the effort to use research to establish social work’s status and to prove its professional legitimacy has come an ever-deepening chasm between research and practice, and the usefulness of research to social work practitioners. The ascent of research that is taking place in social work today threatens to make quality practice obsolete. It places a premium on practice that emphasizes the quickly measurable and demonstrable. It too often fails to take into account the complexities of individuals and of the relationship between the individual and the social. Such complexity is often not meaningfully measurable. Evidence is not always immediately available, for example, to prove the value of the kinds of socialization groups with youths, so much a part of group work practice, whose significance and benefits may be realized over time and even years after their occurrence.

Professional judgment in social work practice is being devalued as a result of the emphasis on research. Recently I taught a professional seminar course at Hunter to students in our one-year residence program, students who have had substantial experience in social work before coming to school. In this course, which takes place in their last semester of school, students are asked to write a paper of quality in an area of their interest that is rooted in their own practice. At the start of the course, each student discusses the subject of her interest.

One student, describing her interest, explained that she has been working for the past eight years with families with young children with learning disabilities. She had noticed a problem that she would like to examine in her paper. “When a child is very young, the services and resources for a family are plentiful and individualized,” she said. “But when the child reaches the age of five, the locus of service becomes the Board of Education and services become less plentiful and are delivered in a more bureaucratic, less individualized, and more stigmatizing way. This creates difficulties and stress for the family.” She was proposing a paper that would discuss this transition and the difficulties for families it presented.

I thought her subject was an excellent one. “How do you envision yourself going about it?” I asked. “I’d put together a focus group of parents and ask them what difficulties they’d faced when their children turned five,” she replied. “But don’t you have a good idea of what those difficulties are based on your eight years of work with the families?” I said. “Seems to me you want to be examining the difficulties in your paper, not just identifying them.” “Yes, I know what the difficulties are,” she responded, “but in research we were taught that we shouldn’t impose our thinking, that it needed to come from the clients.”

This student’s perception of what research is saying is, in fact, an erroneous one. But regardless of its veracity, that is the sense with which our students are emerging from social work school. We have seen that perception demonstrated over and over again by graduating students, that their experience does not count and is not to be trusted. The result, we believe, is a social work discourse that is becoming devoid of thoughtful discussion, one in which no ideas are valid unless they have been poked and prodded and examined in formal research studies. Increasingly, less and less room exists for practice wisdom and professional judgment. To eliminate such wisdom and judgment is to deprive workers and the profession itself of the excitement and vast benefits of experience.

It is difficult to practice group work in many agencies today. The lack of group work education and the emphasis on research contribute to the difficulty. In addition, funding sources and managed care often place a premium on numbers served, on rapid improvement, on time limits, and on concrete goals that can be measured easily. Such emphases can place constraints upon and make difficult the formation of groups that are meaningful to their members.

One new worker in a community health clinic noticed that the agency was working individually with a number of teenage girls who were survivors of childhood sexual abuse. She thought that a group for these young women would make sense. But her suggestion was met with discouragement, as she explained:

I had thought that a weekly group in addition to individual meetings on a weekly basis would make sense, but [the director] told me that this would not fare well. She said that the treatment goal for those seeking help at the agency was that the level of care should be stepped down over the course of a client’s treatment. And if I were to have group meetings for these girls, in addition to their weekly scheduled individual sessions, it would appear that they were needing more, not less, care. The result would be that questions would automatically be asked about whether the clients were actually deteriorating in their ability to function, as it would seem that they were requiring more, not less, attention.

The group this worker suggested never did get formed.

Neither did a group for a similar population that another worker, also in a mental health clinic, thought about trying to start. But in this instance, it was the worker herself who aborted the formation of the group because of concerns that she had. “There is a tendency in the agency to open up groups and ‘broaden’ the theme when there is not enough attendance,” she said. She cited a group for isolated elderly persons that was opened to younger disabled clients when only a few older persons attended, even though the elderly clients attended consistently and the group seemed to be meeting their needs. “I can imagine some similarities between the isolation of elderly and of younger disabled clients,” she said, “but I think that mixing these two rather different groups demonstrated an insensitivity to each.”

The concern this worker had about forming a group for teenage girls who had been sexually abused was that since the number of such girls being served by the agency was small, she would be asked eventually by the agency to open the group to other populations to increase the number of members—male survivors of sexual abuse, perhaps, or adult survivors. She thought that such a request would be inappropriate. As a result, she did not even attempt to form the group. She did not wish to risk the professional conflict that such a request would raise for her.

In elementary schools, another setting where groups have been used traditionally, group work has also become increasingly difficult. The emphasis on test scores has made all too many public schools oppressive places that lack any sense of joy or fun or creativity. Teachers feel extremely pressured to elicit from their students a good performance on standardized tests. School administrators’ purposes for groups often conflict with the purposes of school social workers.

The principal of one elementary school, for example, wanted the school newspaper group and the product it produced to be a “show piece” that she could use to demonstrate her school’s excellence. She banned two boys from continuing to participate in the newspaper group, even over the objections of the social worker who led the group. She told the social worker that the boys had been noisy and that they needed to behave and demonstrate self-control before they could be allowed to participate. She was adamant about her decision, even when the social worker attempted to explain her point of view about the benefits of the group for these boys, whose group participation had been active and enthusiastic.

The current climate makes it difficult for social workers in schools because so often they have a different perspective from the teachers, whose emphasis is on better test scores and classroom management and control. The following example, reported by a social work student whose internship was in an elementary school, illustrates that different perspective:

When I arrived in the cafeteria there was an excited buzz among the teachers. The stop light that had been ordered for the cafeteria had arrived and the teachers felt this was a long overdue addition to help control the noise level. Previously they had relied on making the children stand against the wall when they spoke above a whisper. Now the stop light would be used instead to do the monitoring. It was promptly mo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Caught in the Doorway Between Education and Practice: Group Work’s Battle for Survival
• 2 Thinking Group in Collaboration and Community Building: An Interprofessional Model
• 3 The Genealogy of Group Work: The Missing Factor in Teaching Skill Today
• 4 A Cross System Initiative Supporting Child Welfare Workforce Professionalization and Stabilization: A Task Group in Action
• 5 Mutual Empathy: A Means of Improving the Quality of Emergency Health Care Services Rendered to Marginalized, Addicted Individuals
• 6 Assessing Skills in Groupwork: A Program of Continuing Professional Development
• 7 The Use of Group Work with New York City Firefighters Post-9/11
• 8 Support Groups for Welfare Moms
• 9 Mask Making and Social Groupwork
• 10 Why We Get No Respect: Existential Dilemmas for Group Workers Who Work with Kids’ Groups
• 11 Traumatic Grief Groups for Children, Adolescents and their Caregivers: A Short-Term Treatment Model
• 12 Group Work with Adolescent Sexual Offenders in Community-based Treatment