As Social Workers working directly with individuals and groups who are vulnerable, we frequently come up with several hypotheses and theories to describe and label certain behaviours common to a group of persons. These labels may be construed according to common groupings of race, gender, age, or more specific labels such as “children of incarcerated parents”, “victims of spousal abuse”, “Youth at risk”, “Children with Autism”, and so on. It is interesting to note that oftentimes these labels intersect and overlap with each other, and one would question whether we are really able to predict and understand our client’s behaviour through the generalizations that we make in society today.
I have noted in my line of work, that there are always exceptions in working with clients: not all women feel powerless in a violent relationship, not all Youths at Risk come from difficult backgrounds, and not all Children become traumatized at the loss of a parent through incarceration. As much as the generalizations and theories we create and postulate guide us in our interventions, they may also blind us to the intricacies and the uniqueness of each individual case.
To illustrate this further, Brian Cade (1994) wrote about how labels and frameworks we have to understand human behaviour may actually impede our thinking about client situations.
“…to consider anything, we have to have a framework for thinking about it. The error is not that we have frameworks, but that we forget that they are only frameworks and confuse them with reality. Once we take a position on anything we begin to close our minds to other possibilities and then tend to select and interpret data that confirms that position and to not see, ignore or reject what contradicts it.” (Cade: 1993 p 41)
Drawing from the above statement, the social worker from a developmental perspective would see problems in the client system relating to the client’s developmental history and unresolved past conflicts; the worker with a structural perspective would see inherent problems in the hierarchy of the family system and so on. The lens that we use actually defines the problem for us; but it may be alarming if different lens spew out altogether different intervention modalities.
If the argument is that we can never understand the total experience of our clients, social workers should not totally rely on our theories and frameworks to describe, predict and finally intervene in our clients’ lives.
Frameworks are useful in making sense of part of our clients’ experiences. Theories and frameworks form building blocks for social workers to gain a glimpse into what their clients might be feeling, hence the need to continue research and theorizing about clients’ experiences in different situations. However, this build up of knowledge has to be complemented with the position of uncertainty, where social workers can be open to nuances in our clients’ experiences.
References
Cade, B. & O’ Hanlon, W. H. (1993). A Brief Guide to Brief Therapy. Norton Professional.
Fay, B. (1997). Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science. Blackwell Publishers.
Clients are people, just like you and I. Therefore they must be treated like people. I think each individual has a different behavior pattern hence i don't believe they should be labelled as belonging to a group at all
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