The Life Model of Social Work Practice

Advances in Theory and Practice

Alex Gitterman, Carel Germain

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231511537
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Trabajo social

Originally published in 1980, this seminal work was the first to introduce an ecological perspective into social work practice. The third edition expands and deepens this perspective, further developing the basic premise that, by being situated within the people:environment interface, the social work profession is distinct from other service professions. The book presents the "what" (theories and concepts) and the "how" (practice methods) to help people with their life stressors and, simultaneously, to influence communities, organizations, and policymakers to be more responsive to them.

In this edition, Gitterman and Germain examine major changes to our socioeconomic and political landscape. They restore a chapter on the history of social work practice, offering a view of the limited services for African Americans provided by settlements and charity organization societies. Building on the African American self-help and mutual aid traditions, this chapter traces the replication of a parallel social service system by African American leaders for their own communities. The chapter also addresses the impact of contemporary societal trends, including the global economy, immigration, cultural changes, and the technology revolution. In addition, it discusses current professional contexts of managed mental health care, evidence-based practice, and the professional uses of technology.

A new chapter explores issues and processes embedded in assessment, practice monitoring, and practice evaluation. The volume continues to feature innovative schema for assessment and intervention with respect to stressful life transitions and traumatic events, environmental pressures, and dysfunctional interpersonal processes. Practice illustrations offer reflections of today's major social issues, such as AIDS, homelessness, and modern forms of violence.

• P A R T O N E •

OVERVIEW

Part 1 introduces the historical context for the life model. The current conceptual framework of the ecological perspective for social work practice follows the historical perspective. A brief overview of life-modeled practice is also presented: its defining features, modalities, methods, and skills. Part 1 concludes with a discussion of assessment, practice monitoring, and practice evaluation.

Chapter 1 traces themes and trends in the United States’ historical development of social work’s practice purposes and methods. Particular attention is paid to the historical dialectics such as cause-function (social action–clinical treatment), generalist-specialist, and the science and art of practice. The current societal context (economic, political, legislative, and cultural) and its impact on current professional developments are explored.

Chapter 2 reviews the major ecological concepts that underlie life-modeled practice:

1. Ecological thinking focuses on the reciprocity of person:environment exchanges, in which each shapes and influences the other over time. (The colon is used to repair the conceptually fractured relationship suggested by the hyphen in person-environment.)

2. Varied levels of fit between people’s needs, goals, and rights, and their environment’s qualities and processes, within a historical and cultural context; adaptedness and adaptation, achieved by making changes in the self, the environment, or both in order to improve or sustain the level of fit; maladaptiveness leading to dysfunctional perceptions, emotions, thinking, and action; and positive and negative feedback processes.

3. Salutary and nonsalutary human habitats and niches.

4. Vulnerability, oppression, abuse or misuse of power, and social and technological pollution.

5. The “life course” conception of nonuniform pathways to human development and functioning, replacing traditional formulations that consider development a journey through fixed, sequential, universal stages. The life course conception incorporates human, environmental, and cultural diversity, and it is applicable to individuals and groups. It also makes use of temporal concepts—historic, social, and individual time—in considering psychosocial functioning.

6. Life stressors that threaten the level of fit and lead to associated emotional or physiological stress, and the coping tasks that require personal skills and environmental resources for managing the life stressors and reducing the associated stress.

7. Resilience reflects moment-to-moment consequences and outcomes of complex person:environment transactions and not simply attributes of a person. Protective factors that help people to negotiate high-risk situations include (1) temperament, (2) family patterns, (3) external supports, and (4) environmental resources.

8. Deep ecology deepens our understanding that all phenomena are interconnected and interdependent as well as dependent on the cyclical processes of nature. The interdependence of networks, the self-correcting feedback loops, and the cyclical nature of ecological processes are three basic principles of deep ecology.

9. Ecological feminism or ecofeminism challenges the culture/nature dichotomy. To ecofeminists, the oppression of women and ecological degradation are intertwined: both evolve from hierarchical, male domination. Hierarchal structures and oppression are always together.

Chapter 3 provides a brief overview of the origins and characteristics of life-modeled practice. Ten features, in unique combination, define life-modeled practice: (1) professional purpose and function, which includes practice with individuals, families, groups, and communities, and organizational and political advocacy; (2) ethical practice; (3) diversity-sensitive and skillful practice; (4) empowering and social justice practice; (5) integrated modalities, methods, and skills; (6) the client:worker relationship regarded as a partnership; (7) agreements, assessments, and life stories; (8) a focus on personal and collective strengths and on client action and decision making; (9) the pervasive significance of social and physical environments and culture; (10) the evaluation of practice and contribution to knowledge building.

The preparatory, initial, ongoing, and ending phases of work structure life-modeled practice, even in one-session and episodic services, where the phases are temporally collapsed. Life-modeled practice focuses on (1) painful life transitions and traumatic life events; (2) poverty, oppression, and unresponsiveness or harshness of social and physical environments; and (3) dysfunctional interpersonal processes in families or groups and sometimes between the practitioner and the people served. These and many other aspects are considered in greater detail and depth in parts 2 and 3.

Chapter 4 examines assessment tasks common to all practice approaches as well as a few underlying beliefs that are distinct to life-modeled practice. Life-modeled practice strongly values and encourages client participation in the assessment tasks, and emphasizes assessment of the level of fit between human needs and environmental resources. Graphic representations—ecomap, genogram, and social network map—and force-field analysis provide a visual “snapshot” of individuals’, families’, groups’, communities’, social networks’, and organizations’ capacities to deal with stressors and change.

The chapter also examines the tasks and skills of practice monitoring. To truly monitor practice interventions, they must be evaluated by how the client experiences and evaluates their connectedness to the underlying messages being conveyed rather than by what the professional intended to accomplish. Various practice-monitoring instruments are discussed and illustrated. The chapter concludes with an examination of the strengths and limitations of different research designs used to evaluate practice outcomes.

We hope that the examination of historical context and contemporary societal and professional themes, the ecological concepts, and the overview of the totality of life-modeled practice and issues related to assessment, practice monitoring, and practice evaluation in part 1 will help the reader move confidently and eagerly into parts 2 and 3 and their detailed study of a complex professional practice. It is complex because it is designed to prepare students and seasoned practitioners to move knowledgeably and skillfully among varied modalities (individual, family, group, neighborhood and community, organizational, and political) as needed.

• O N E •

SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE AND ITS HISTORICAL TRADITIONS

The generalist and integrative methods of the life model of practice are both an outcome of historical trends and a response to current issues within the profession. New or emerging forms of practice need to be understood in the light of professional traditions that have spurred their development. They need to be understood also in the light of demands placed upon the profession by external forces in its environment and by internal forces within the profession. Both past and present shape the characteristics of practice. In this chapter, we trace themes and trends in the historical development in the United States of social work’s practice purposes and methods. We pay particular attention to the historical dialectics such as cause or function (social action or clinical treatment), generalist or specialist, and science or art. These historical dialectics help to explain the existence and nature of contemporary practice issues and efforts to integrate divergent traditions.

Early Societal and Professional Themes

Occupational Forerunners

The process of divergence began in the United States when two streams of thought appeared in the nineteenth-century arena of social welfare, then called “charities and corrections.” One was more interested in theory, and the other in methods of help. Both streams arose out of the social events, requirements, and ideologies of the times. Profound transformation in the social order had taken place in the years after the Civil War. Change was everywhere: in the westward push by wagon and later by rail; in the migration from farms to the towns and cities; in the movement of vast tides of immigrants away from old world oppressions and famines to new world freedoms and opportunities; in the expansions of knowledge, science, and technology; and in the development of graduate education and increasing specialization and professionalization in the occupational structure. Greatest of all, perhaps, were the changes in values and norms as the nation shifted from an agrarian to an industrialized, urbanized society. To most white citizens, these movements, changes, and expansions seemed to offer unlimited opportunities for those who wished to respond to them.

In actuality, the twin forces of industrialization and urbanization, with which these movements and expansions were interdependent, were accompanied by severe social disorganization. Industrialization (as well as the rationalization and bureaucratization of production) led to the concentration of wealth and power and the growing alienation of labor. Persistent poverty was aggravated by cyclical depressions. Wretched housing, inadequate schools, and oppressive work arrangements characterized crowded urban slums and poor rural areas. The government itself favored and was, in fact, in thrall to the nation’s business interests. The principle of laissez-faire was for the poor; the principle of free enterprise advanced the interests of the rich and the powerful and the white; and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld property rights at the expense of human rights. Slavery and segregation had a devastating impact on black citizens.

After the Civil War, more and more of society’s “dependent classes”—its paupers, insane, and criminal groups—came under the aegis of state administration. Increasingly, their public care and control moved from a single locus of responsibility in the village overseer and the local almshouse to state boards of charities, state insane asylums, and prisons. Child-saving agencies and voluntary associations for relieving the plight of the poor appeared in the private arena. A number of persons who were engaged in such public or private work joined with a group of New England intellectuals, interested in the new social science in England, to organize the American Social Science Association (ASSA) in 1865. Soon after the initial meetings, however, conflicting concerns overshadowed their mutual interests. The interest of the ASSA intellectuals lay in developing knowledge about the operations of the social order so that social conditions could be changed. By contrast, the interest of those directly engaged in the care and control of society’s “misfits” lay in developing the best methods for such control, care, and containment. The latter practical group believed their pressing and present concerns were overlooked by the emphasis of the intellectuals on theory development geared to achieving an uncertain gain in an unknown future.

In 1874, the practice people withdrew from the ASSA and established Conference of Charities (CC), which, in 1879, became the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (NCCC), and subsequently became the National Conference on Social Welfare (NCSW). An interesting question is whether “Corrections” was added in its traditional field of practice meaning or, more likely, as a prelude to notions about changing people as well as distributing charity. Temporarily, at least during the 1880s, the tension between theory of social causation and methodological concerns receded; exchanging experiences in the use of different methods received primary attention. Until journals and other organizations developed, the NCCC was the principal forum for this kind of exchange.

Ideologically, the dialectical development in social work practice was more complex. Several currents of conflicting ideas appeared, and even within each current there was little unanimity of opinion. One stream of ideas was associated with the Poor Law philosophy of the colonial and antebellum periods. It included, for example, the principle of less eligibility and the settlement laws, which themselves had earlier roots in England and Europe. This stream was often accompanied by a concern that charity might lead the needy into pauperism by weakening their moral fiber. The Puritan ethic, which viewed dependency as the consequence of sin, and the Calvinistic emphases on work and on individualism fortified by the frontier spirit were congruent with a repressive stance. It was an ambivalent stance, however, since there were strong threads of piety involved, especially in attitudes toward the poor. One such thread was a humane concern for the suffering of others as in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Another and perhaps stronger thread was the promise of salvation through the giving of alms. In this view, the poor existed so that the rich might give to them, receive grace, and enter the kingdom of heaven.

Another ideological current was a growing interest in science and its promise of unlimited progress through knowledge and technology. Indeed, it was this interest coupled with idealistic reformism that had led to the establishment of the ASSA. If physical laws governed the universe with such magnificent precision as Isaac Newton and others had shown, the argument ran, then laws governing society and the interaction of human beings might also be discovered. It seemed to ASSA intellectuals, and later to some groups within the NCCC, that such laws could then be used to create a better society. They assumed that the social world was governed, like the physical world, by a set of immutable laws and that the purpose of social science was to discover and understand these laws. Many who held this conviction appeared also to believe that environmental causes were more salient than personal waywardness in most forms of human distress. Thus, the conflict between theoretical and practical interests was also related to tensions around the nature of causality, which developed in the 1880s and continued in the decades that followed. In general, the theoreticians believed causality lay in the environment, while the methodologists believed causality was to be found in the wickedness, shiftlessness, and weakness of individuals.

Connected to the interest in science, yet ultimately nonscientific in outlook, was the rise of social Darwinism that applied (actually, misapplied) Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution to societal processes.¹ Social Darwinism provided a rationalization for the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful. Political thought, interacting with capitalistic developments, became increasingly dominated by conservatism and its emphases on economic freedom and the sanctity of private property. Political, philosophical, religious, and pseudo-scientific ideas thus combined to help create a point of view in society that opposed environmental reform.

Within this matrix of social ideas and events, two more groups joined the newly formed occupational group, exemplified by the NCCC, in the late 1880s. These were the charity organization societies that began in the United States in 1887 (Buffalo, New York), and the neighborhood settlements that began in 1886 (e.g., the Neighborhood Guild in New York City). During the Progressive era (ca. 1890–1920), both movements responded to major economic, social, and political changes. In search for employment opportunities and an improved quality of life, African Americans migrated from the South and white ethnics emigrated from Europe to northern and midwestern urban centers. These migrants and immigrants provided inexpensive labor for industries and factories. By 1914, the workforce increased seven times from the workforce in 1859. Similarly, while in the 1880s only 28.7 percent of the population in the United States (50.1 million) lived in urban areas, as compared to 35.1 percent of 63 million in the early 1900s, by 1920 the overall population had increased to more than 105 million, with 51.2 percent living in urban areas (Iglehart & Becerra, 2000, pp. 17, 19). Many social problems such as slums and crime became associated with this dramatic urban population growth.

In response to these social problems, charity organization societies and settlements appeared almost simultaneously. Each was imbued with ideas and structures that originated in Victorian England. Both spread rapidly around the country, and, although the two movements took somewhat different ideological positions and different practice outlooks, they possessed important similarities. Both appealed to young, upper- and middle-class, well-educated idealists of the day, and most especially to young women. Higher education for women had only just begun on any recognizable scale, and a new group of young women students and graduates were eager to be of service. They were looking for ways to apply their newly acquired insights and understanding to society’s growing problems. The young women were also looking for ways to become financially independent. Both th...