What Is Group Work?

Robert K. Conyne, Leann Terry Diederich

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781483332314
• eBook ISBN: 9781483317908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Counseling
• Index: Social Sciences

A practical guide to improving the everyday practice of group work
Establishing a general context and framework for the volumes included in the Group Work Practice Kit, What Is Group Work? presents an inclusive overview of group work in an easy-to-read format. Authors Robert K. Conyne and Leann T. Diederich:

• Define types of groups
• Connect with accreditation and/or specialty standards
• Demonstrate how best practices in group work and attention to diversity and multicultural issues can be used to guide practice
• Illustrate how key group processes (for example, group cohesion) can be used to mobilize effort
• Set the stage for translating available group work evidence into group leader practice

What Is Group Work? is part of the Group Work Practice Kit: Improving the Everyday Practice of Group Work, a collection of nine books each authored by scholars in the specific field of group work. To promote a consistent reading experience, the books in the collection conform to editor Robert K. Conyne's outline. Designed to provide practitioners, instructors, students, and trainees with concrete direction for improving group work, the series provides thorough coverage of the entire span of group work practice.

This book is endorsed by the Association for Specialists in Group Work.

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1	Ingredients of Group Work
	What Practitioners Need to Know and Do

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In this first chapter, we will examine the major ingredients of group work, with an eye toward what it is that group practitioners really need to know and be able to do. But first, let’s begin by presenting a brief scenario that will guide our discussion and your application.

Guiding Scenario

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Imagine that you are a counselor in the university counseling center. This well-respected center is known for excellence in providing individual, direct counseling services to students. A new director is bringing to the center a number of new perspectives and initiatives, with a theme meant to help the center increase its visibility and develop a broader array of services for all members of the university population.

As part of this new approach, group work services are envisioned, and guess what? You have been named the group work coordinator. Your assigned task is to develop a plan for instituting a comprehensive group work program for the center that will target the wide range of needs presented by the university population. Keep the above scenario in mind as you read about the ingredients of group work, to follow.

Definition of Group Work

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When one is asked to create a plan for a comprehensive group work program, many questions arise. Some of them revolve around program development processes that are necessary to guide program creation (Conyne, 2010), while others relate to understanding the parameters that will be used to define the group work services themselves. These latter matters are what we will focus on in this introductory book.

Our attention will be focused most closely, but not only, on what we term person-change groups within group work—counseling, therapy, and psychoeducation. We do this for two reasons: (a) Person-change groups most often are what counselors and other professional helpers are called on to deliver, and (b) most of the knowledge about group work comes from studies of those kinds of groups. Yet, consistent with a comprehensive view of group work, we will encourage you also to consider how the information provided connects with task groups.

As the newly appointed group work coordinator, one of your first tasks is to accumulate the best information about group work services you can, prior to moving ahead with action planning steps. An important first step is to answer this question: “What is comprehensive group work?” Doing so will allow you to project an initial operating framework to suggest to others when moving forward together in designing the overall group work services program.

You begin by posing to yourself a teasing question: “What is it about being in a group that is beneficial?” From personal experience, you know that generally you enjoy being with others because often these experiences can be fun and satisfying. When you’ve been confronted by a life challenge, such as coping with the recent death of your father, you’ve frequently found it helpful and supportive to talk with friends and sometimes family members about it; in the case of losing your father, you found becoming involved with group counseling to be additionally helpful. You typically have noticed that working on projects in a group or team, while sometimes frustrating, can yield ideas and solutions you could not have reached alone. You also cannot forget what an older neighborhood couple, Ruby and Oren, said about why they persisted over 35 years, sunny or snowy, to participate in a weekly Saturday afternoon card game: “It’s not the card playing we like; it’s our friends!” (Conyne, 2004). Further, it turns out from your reading that many of your personal experiences with groups are supported by general research in the scholarly literature (e.g., Forsyth, 2011; Hogg, Hohman, & Rivera, 2008; Kivlighan, Miles, & Paquin, 2011).

Your knowledge of the scholarly literature also supports the use of group approaches. It is important to realize this fact, because the counseling center you represent needs to successfully provide services that both address important local needs and are supported by evidence. It is obvious to most practitioners and policymakers that group methods are efficient because a number of people can be reached and helped simultaneously by just one or two group leaders. Moreover, the research coalesces to indicate that well-designed and well-delivered group work services often are as effective as individually delivered ones, sometimes more so (for summaries, see, for example, Conyne, 2011a, 2011b; DeLucia-Waack, Gerrity, Kalodner, & Riva, 2004).

As you continue conducting background research into the field of group services, you come to an understanding that theorists and practitioners alike have adopted different conceptions of these group services. As in the broader counseling field itself, a commonly accepted definition of the process of counseling has remained elusive over the decades. Yet, on October 28, 2010, the following definition was adopted by the American Counseling Association Governing Council: “Counseling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals” (American Counseling Association, 2013).

By contrast, it seems to you that any common definition of group services still awaits general agreement. What is meant by the term group services? As with counseling itself, are group services intended to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals? Or are those goals attached solely to group counseling? Should group services be focused on one or several methods? On group counseling? Group psychotherapy? What about other forms of group delivery, such as psychoeducation, support, prevention, or task facilitation? Are they intended to empower, to treat, to prevent? Do they address people who are functioning well or those who are in distress? Or all? Are all these dimensions listed (and perhaps others that are not) to be included? Is it possible that one of the group methods, such as group counseling, might include all the other ones (i.e., group therapy, psychoeducation, etc.)? And, finally, what is meant by “comprehensive group work”?

Considering these issues, you find yourself literally scratching your head in confusion. Yet, the existing professional literature on this topic is fairly robust (for summaries, see Barlow, Burlingame, & Fuhriman, 2000; Barlow, Fuhriman, & Burlingame, 2005; Conyne, 2011a; Ward, 2011) and informative, laying out the various perspectives. However, you find it falls short of the directional clarity you seek. You realize that coming to a position on defining group services through a comprehensive group work approach is necessary for guiding how the counseling center will proceed in that area.

In your research, you come across a number of valuable resources for conceptualizing group approaches and guiding their implementation and evaluation. You note that the American Group Psychotherapy Association’s (2007) Practice Guidelines for Group Psychotherapy: A Cross-Theoretical Guide to Developing and Leading Psychotherapy Groups is full of excellent, research-based recommendations for creating, conducting, and evaluating psychotherapy groups. Yet you wonder if the focus on psychotherapy groups (depending on how narrowly they are defined) meets the criterion given to you to develop a plan for comprehensive group work. You branch out of the psychology and counseling fields to discover the Standards for Social Work Practice With Groups, created by the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups (2005). Aimed at social workers, you find these suggestions to be valuable because they address a wide range of groups (e.g., treatment, psychoeducational, support, community action, and task) in a variety of settings. You immediately see the potential for adapting some of these recommendations to fit a counseling center setting. As a member of the Society for Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy (of the American Psychological Association), you are aware of the extensive publications and presentations of many of its members and fellows—many of them influential in the broad field of “groups,” particularly for attention given to group practice informed by group research (Society of Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy, 2013).

You then conduct an Internet search to locate resources developed by the Association for Specialists in Group Work (ASGW; see www.asgw.org), a division of the American Counseling Association. As a longtime member of the association, you’ve been attracted over the years to what seems to you to be its comprehensive perspective on conceptualizing, organizing, and delivering group services, within the lens of the counseling profession. But it’s been a while since you’ve worked with those materials, and you need a refresher.

Perspective of the Association for Specialists in Group Work

You download from the ASGW website three resources that you think might be helpful for clarifying group work and providing some direction for responding to your assignment as the counseling center group work coordinator: (a) Professional Standards for the Training of Group Workers (Wilson, Rapin, & Haley-Banez, 2000), (b) Best Practice Guidelines (Thomas & Pender, 2008), and (c) Multicultural and Social Justice Competence Principles for Group Workers (Singh, Merchant, Skudrzyk, & Ingene, 2012). Of the three documents, the first one, related to professional training standards, seems to hold the most pertinent information for your initial need to better understand a basic definition of group work.

After reading some of the history leading up to the present document (e.g., that it was preceded by documents published in 1983 and 1990), you are reminded that the primary purpose of the current version is to assist in training future group workers, consisting mainly of students in counselor training programs. But you find some of what you are looking for early in this document, where the term group work is defined (Wilson et al., 2000, p. 3):

• Group work is a broad professional practice
• involving the application of knowledge and skill in group facilitation
• to assist an interdependent collection of people
• to reach their mutual goals
• which may be intrapersonal, interpersonal, or work-related and may include
• the accomplishment of tasks related to work, education, personal development, personal and interpersonal problem solving,
• o...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1: Ingredients of Group Work: What Practitioners Need to Know and Do
• Chapter 2: Evidence of Group Work Effectiveness: Meaning for Practitioners
• Chapter 3: Best Practice Guidelines in Group Work
• Chapter 4: Multicultural Competency and Social Justice in Group Work
• Chapter 5: Key Change Processes in Group Work
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS