Social Work Practice

Integrating Concepts, Processes, and Skills

Marion Bogo

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231546553
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Travail social

Since its publication more than ten years ago, Social Work Practice has been widely used as a succinct and focused book to prepare human service providers in the key components underpinning direct practice. This second edition builds on the first edition's success at synthesizing the latest theories and practice models; helping and change processes; empirical findings; and practice skills, and demonstrates how these interlinked dimensions contribute to the EPAS 2015-endorsed model of holistic competence.

The second edition of Social Work Practice is updated with new empirical findings and foundational information, while also supplementing the text with the concepts and competencies in EPAS 2015. With an overall theme of holistic competence, it incorporates the significant role of cognitive and affective processes in social workers' professional practice and discusses ways of developing and maintaining a reflective practice. With useful material on interpersonal communication, cross-cultural practice, and the use of technology in one guide, Marion Bogo lays a general foundation for social work practice and professional development.

PART 1

Conceptual Frameworks for Social Work Practice

1

A View of Holistic Competence in Social Work

Social work practice is a highly complex activity. It requires practitioners to integrate and apply a wide range of elements in attuned, authentic, and skillful interactions. Mastery of practice involves the ability to bring together the knowledge and value base of the profession with the social worker’s personal self. Social workers develop their own unique expressions of this combination of interrelated factors. For social work students, this view presents a challenging task, as there is much to learn and to assimilate. This book aims to provide an integration of selected generic theoretical concepts, relevant empirically based change processes, long-standing social work practice principles, and communication and interviewing skills for use in direct practice or clinical social work. The first two chapters present a view of holistic competence that captures the essential nature of social work and provides a framework for thinking about one’s learning and development as a professional.

AN INTEGRATED VIEW OF PRACTICE

Social workers carry out practices or practice behaviors, usually conceived of in overlapping and iterative phases. They develop collaborative relationships with their clients, establish mutually agreed-on goals, and strive for shared understandings of presenting and related issues. Social workers’ assessments guide planning and help them choose interventions to achieve these goals. The client and the social worker continuously consider whether the helping process is effectively progressing toward achieving goals. Such feedback helps social workers determine whether their initial understandings and subsequent actions are effective or whether different approaches should be identified and used. All the while, the developing relationship between the client and the social worker may be strengthened or challenged, requiring efforts at repair. While this is often presented as a linear process, in actual practice a looping process unfolds. As client and social worker come to know each other better, and as trust begins to be established, preliminary assessments will be enriched with emerging information. Hence, the focus of the work, the nature of the interventions, and the systems that need to be included may change over time.

Each social worker conveys attitudes, behaviors, and a general stance that represent her integration of “a range of knowledge, values, skills, and cognitive and affective processes that include the social worker’s critical thinking, affective reactions, and exercise of judgment in regard to unique practice situations” (CSWE, 2015, 6). In other words, professional knowledge in its broadest sense becomes part of and is powerfully influenced by the social worker’s personal self (Larrison and Korr 2013). As a result, it is a long-standing tradition—one that continues in the present day—that social workers must have a degree of self-awareness and a reflective-critical stance about the way their personal values, assumptions, reactions, and judgments play out in their work. Such a stance is needed so that assessments and interventions are constructed to meet clients’ needs and unique experiences.

Interpersonal interactions are the bedrock of practice. It is through the words we use, as well as the attitudes and feelings we convey verbally and nonverbally, that clients and social workers may achieve the goals they set together. Social workers’ communication behaviors and interviewing skills are the primary tools of practice. Social workers need to use them intentionally and flexibly to forge and maintain relationships with clients. The social worker–client relationship is the crucible for the helping and change processes that affect outcome. These processes include conversations in which—through active listening, feedback, and dialogue—social workers’ insights and clients’ perspectives are shared. This open, trusting relationship is a hallmark of professional social work and receives considerable support from empirical studies in related fields (Wampold and Budge 2012).

In contemporary diverse societies, both the social worker and the client are likely to reflect multiple dimensions of difference as well as similarity. Such dimensions include, but are not limited to, “age, class, color, culture, disability and ability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, immigration status, marital status, political ideology, race, religion/spirituality, sex, sexual orientation, and tribal sovereign status” (CSWE 2015, 7). Social workers need to strive to understand and bridge differences so that meaningful relationships can occur.

Through a series of studies in a long-standing program of research, our research team developed a theoretical understanding of holistic competence in social work (Bogo et al. 2013, 2006). Based on in-depth interviews with experienced social work field instructors, this understanding went beyond typical views of competence. Competence is usually defined as consisting of knowledge, skills, and attitudes or values. Critics in social work and medicine note that when competence is further specified, it results in ever-growing lists of discrete, specific behavioral skills (Hackett 2001; Kelly and Horder 2001). Competencies are broken down “into the smallest observable units of behavior, creating endless nested lists of abilities that frustrate learners and teachers alike” (Frank et al. 2010, 643) and the organic and evolving nature of professional practice is lost (Hodges and Lingard 2012). Our studies led to a different and more complex view of competence consisting of two interrelated dimensions. As described by Bogo and colleagues (2013):

One dimension, metacompetence, refers to higher order, overarching qualities and abilities of a conceptual, interpersonal, and personal/professional nature. This includes students’ cognitive, critical, and self-reflective capacities. The second dimension, procedural competence, refers to performance and the ability to use procedures in various stages of the helping process and includes the ability, for example, in direct practice, to form a collaborative relationship, to carry out an assessment, and to implement interventions with clients and systems. (261)

Furthermore, our data showed the linkage and significant impact of metacompetence on procedural competence. Specifically, cognitive and affective dimensions such as critical thinking, self-awareness, and self-regulation affect the way social workers engage in their actual practice. Our personal reactions and feelings powerfully affect our thinking and the nature of our assessments, rationale for intervention, and use of skill, whether it is intentional and thoughtful or reactive and not purposeful. This view of metacompetence has also been expressed by scholars in related human services and health professions such as management (Fleming 1991; Winterton 2009), medicine (Epstein and Hundert 2002; Fernandez et al. 2012), professional psychology (Hatcher and Lassiter 2007; Weinert 2001), and in studies of over twenty professions (Cheetham and Chivers 1996, 2005).

FIGURE 1.1 A model of holistic competence in social work.

Source: Reprinted with permission from the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), from Bogo et al. (2014).

Figure 1.1 provides a diagram that presents this view. Dimensions of holistic competence represented in this figure are discussed in detail later in this chapter and in chapters 2 and 3. While this discussion relates holistic competence to direct practice in social work, this model has been found to be applicable to social work practice at all levels—micro, mezzo, and macro (Regehr et al. 2012).

COMPLEX PRACTICE BEHAVIORS AND HOLISTIC COMPETENCE

As can be seen in figure 1.1, the center of the model is complex practice behaviors or complex practices. These key processes or activities constitute what social workers actually do. Most models and texts generally discuss the linked phases of engagement and relationship building, assessment, intervention, and evaluation of practice. Indeed, EPAS 2015 (CSWE 2015, 9) defines these “dynamic and interactive process[es] of social work practice” as they evolve through collaboration between social workers and their clients, in relation to new information and insights that emerge.

DIMENSIONS OF HOLISTIC COMPETENCE: CHAPTER 1

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Complex Practice Behaviors

Skills

The Context of Practice

• The profession
• The organization
• The community

Knowledge

• The role of research

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The way social workers behave is affected by the interrelationships of a number of factors. In common with other helping professions, social workers use a wide range of verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors and interviewing skills to enact the complex practices involved in implementation of the various stages and processes in intervention models. Foundation core skills (at the top left of figure 1.1) are seen when a social worker interacts with clients. Nonverbal behaviors include attending and active listening. Verbal behaviors include asking open- and close-ended questions, seeking clarification, reflection of feelings, and so forth. These skills are discussed in detail in chapter 13.

Contextual factors are depicted at the top and bottom of the figure, and the dimensions of competence are portrayed in the four quadrants. Knowledge refers to formal explanatory theories, codified practice theories, and empirically supported intervention models, as well as principles that emanate from practice wisdom. The way in which we use formal knowledge is affected by our own individual knowledge base (Bogo et al. 2014). It is natural to draw on worldviews, assumptions, and opinions derived from our lived experiences in our personal and professional lives. This personal knowledge base is generally unarticulated and considered to be tacit or implicit. It may operate in an unaware or unconscious manner, but it powerfully affects the way we frame, understand, assess, and make decisions regarding the client situations confronted in practice (Munro 2011). This notion of the personal self operating in conjunction with the professional self is a long-standing concept in social work (Brandell 2004; Larrison and Korr 2013).

Contributions from neuroscience research further illuminate the ways our emotions affect our cognitions (Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007; Kahneman 2011).

Our emotional responses to information and the experience we have when interacting with clients significantly affect our judgments. In turn these emotional responses are related to our tacit knowledge: what we have learned through our personal and professional experiences, the “truths” that are internalized and that are not easily explicitly identified. Therefore, holistic competence must include the ability to be self-aware of our subjective thinking, feeling, and reactions, especially with regard to the judgments we make. Accordingly, self-awareness and emotional self-regulation when involved in professional practice are important dimensions of holistic competence. (Bogo et al. 2014, 8)

Figure 1.1 aims to capture the fact that an interpersonal practice such as social work involves the nuanced integration of a number of dimensions into an organic or synthetic activity. A metaphor that others have used is baking a cake. Baking a cake involves using a number of ingredients that must be combined in the right amounts in the right sequence and baked at the right temperature for the right amount of time. There is a science and an art in baking and in practicing social work (Merrill, Ayasse, and Stone 2015). Another metaphor is a pyramid, where practice behaviors represent the pinnacle of the activity and are supported by the various components of context, knowledge, skills, self-regulation, and judgment.

Honoring the concept of holism, it is important to keep in mind that practice is the result of the social worker’s unique personal and professional integration of professional values, selected concepts, and information filtered through the social worker’s recognition of subjective reactions. As stated in EPAS, “Overall professional competence is multi-dimensional and composed of interrelated competencies. An individual social worker’s competence is seen as developmental and dynamic, changing over time in relation to continuous learning” (CSWE 2015, 6).

THE CONTEXT OF PRACTICE

Contextual factors influence all social work practice. The following section discusses key aspects of the professional, organizational, and community context.

The Profession

All practitioners function within the framework of their respective professions, drawing on their unique knowledge base, values, and mission. In social work, we strive to provide effective service to clients, groups, communities, and organizations to promote social justice and equity. Social workers are highly committed to supporting and bringing about change to enhance individual and social functioning. An enduring theme of the profession includes attention to both the private concerns presented by individuals, families, and communities, and the public issues that exert a profound impact on them. An editorial in Social Work, the journal of the National Association of Social Work, argues for “advancing one social work” recognizing the contributions of micro and macro approaches (Bent-Goodley 2014, 5). The focus in this text is on micro practice, often referred to as direct practice or clinical practice, that is, working with individuals and families. As in all levels of practice, the aim is to deliver intervention in a systematic, knowledge-directed, relationship-based manner that recognizes the impact of the social worker’s professional use of self (CSWE 2009; Gonzalez and Gelman 2015).

A hallmark of the profession is the view that individuals are always understood within the context of their social environment. This environment includes the smallest and most intimate systems, such as couple and family relations, as well as larger systems, such as neighborhoods, communities, and societies. The social environment encompasses societal attitudes, norms, programs, and policies. All of these systems have a profound impact on individual well-being, development through the life course, and social functioning. Related enduring themes of professional social work are commitments to serve oppressed, vulnerable, and marginalized populations; to promote human rights and social justice; to appreciate diversity and difference; and to practice in an antioppressive manner.

The Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) summarizes the purpose of the profession. This statement guides U.S. accredited schools of social work in the design of curriculum to prepare students for practice.

The purpose of the social work profession is to promote human and community well-being. Guided by a person-in-environment framework, a global perspective, respect for human diversity, and knowledge based on scientific inquiry, the purpose of social work is actualized through its quest for social and economic justice, the prevention of conditions that limit human rights, the elimination of poverty, and the enhancement of the quality of life for all persons, locally and globally. (CSWE 2015, 5)

In Canada, accredited schools of social work are guided by a similar statement regarding the purpose of the profession.

Guided by the principles of fundamental human rights and responsibilities and respect for human diversity, social work seeks to facilitate well-being and participation of people, promote social and economic justice, address structural sources of inequities, and eliminate conditions that infringe human and civil rights. Grounded in reflective practice and engaged in persistent inquiry into theoretical and research bases in the field, social work employs professional approaches and interventions to enhance individual, family, group, community, and population well-being. (CASWE-ACFTSA 2014, 2–3)

In addition, social workers are guided by the code of ethics of their national professional bodies. In the United States, the National Association of Social Workers, and in Canada, the Canadian Association of Social Workers, develop and regularly revise their code of ethics and standards of practice. Although the codes of these two organizations vary somewhat in their content, the values presented are very similar and include dimensions such as service to humanity, pursuit of social justice, respect for the inherent human dignity and worth of the person, the importance of human relationships, integrity in professional practice, and competence. These values reflect the humanistic and altruistic philosophical base of the social work profession (Reamer 2013). They also reflect fundamental beliefs such as the importance of working with people in a way that promotes self-determination and empowerment, and respects diversity and difference. These values influence practice in a collaborative, mutually responsible, and antioppressive direction.

Finally, social workers are governed by regulatory bodies. State or provincial legislatures in the United States and Canada define in law standards of professional practice for a wide range of health and human services professions. Each jurisdiction establishes regulatory bodies to protect the public through licensing, certification, or registration of those who claim the title of the specific profession (for example, to be able to call oneself a social worker). These licensing or state boards (often called colleges in Canada) also aim to promote excellent and safe practice by identifying the profession’s scope of practice an...