The Social Work Assessment Process

There are three initial topics social workers must address within direct practice assessments:

1. In the client's perspective, what is his or her primary goal and/or concern?
2. Are there legal mandates that must be met by the social worker and client?
3. Are there immediate or chronic health and safety concerns?
(Hepworth, Rooney, Rooney, and Strom-Gottfried. Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill. 173-174 ) 


How is the Assessment Process linked to Core Social Work Values?

Tools for assessment should remain tightly knit to core social work values. At the top of our list: social workers must address and acknowledge their client's right to self-determination. The client needs to be invested in the process in order to make progress. The social worker's pre-assessment goals might not necessarily be critical within the client's perspective. By encouraging the client to explain and establish their concerns, mutual reciprocity within the client/provider relationship can be established. In addition to having someone listen and empathize with you, it is empowering to find your voice. With the heightened awareness of your client's right to self-determination, social workers should encourage their clients to voice their goals and problems. Within a problem solving mode with another person, a social worker must bridge the needs and objectives of the client with imposed agency or mandated goals. 

Assessments consider a "person in the environment" perspective. The social worker should investigate the client's environmental conditions. The following questions should be adressed as part of the assessment:  What is your client's habitat and what specific roles (their niche) do they play in their habitat? What social systems impact them and how do these impact them positively and/or negatively? What are social safety nets that the client relies on for support? What additional social safety nets might your client be able to connect with in order to receive more support?  People do not exist in a vacuum! Thus it is essential to understand the interconnected systems that impact your client and vice versa.  Cultural competency is a key social work value and skill during this part of the process.  In order to gain a holistic view of the client's habitat the social worker must consider different cultural norms and roles in addition to barriers this client's group might face. Drawing  an ecomap, such as the one below, with the client might be a useful tool during the assessment process. 

image from: http://home.earthlink.net/~mattaini/Ecosystems.html

Understanding your client's habitat allows the social worker to more effectively employ a strengths based approach during the assessment process.  Personal and environmental strengths should be considered. Personal strengths might include: resilience in the face of stress and hardship, confronting rather than avoiding problems, knowing when to seek help and being resourceful. Environmental strengths might include: support groups, family, friends, religious affiliations, institutional affiliations and community involvement such as volunteerism.  

Diagnosis versus Assessment-

While social workers might rely on both of these tools, it is important to highlight their clear differences. Social work assessments posit a holistic view of the client, considering people do not live in a vacum and people's individual problems exist in a wider social context. It accounts for the several different formal and informal systems interacting with your client as potential sources of strength or stress. Diagnosis takes a symptoms based approach to label a condition, such as a medical or mental health condition. Diagnostic tools can sometimes be used as part of a comprehensive assessment. Diagnosis and assessment are not interchangeable terms or processes.     

Micro, Mezzo and Macro Social Work

Micro, Mezzo and Macro Social Work  -

Micro Level practice focuses on personal interaction with your client or consumer on an individual level or with a couple or family. A micro-level intervention could entail a clinical social worker interacting with a client at a mental health facility. Alternatively, it could encompass a school social worker counseling a truant student or a caseworker working one on one with a client at a homeless shelter.

Mezzo Level intervention entails bringing people together who are not as intimate as a couple or family members, but might mutually build and benefit from this social or resource network. It might directly change the system that is affecting a client, such as a classroom or neighborhood group. Examples of mezzo scale work includes group therapy counseling, self-help groups or neighborhood community associations. 

Macro Level practice focuses on systemic issues. It might include creating and maintaining a network of service providers in order to establish a continuum of care. Macro level intervention can intersect with the political realm by creating and lobbying for policy changes. The planning, implementation and maintenance of a social programs are also processes which macro scale practice is aplicable. Coordinating multiple services and policy work offers an opportunity to address several intersecting social problems. 

http://savedsister7.blogspot.com/2012/03/you-knowthose-people.html

Ecological System's HABITAT and NICHE

Keep in mind: "Ecological systems theory posits that individuals constantly engage in transactions with other humans and with other systems in the environment, and that these individuals and systems reciprocally influence each other" (Hepworth, Rooney, Rooney, and Strom-Gottfried. Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill. 15). Considering this perspective, comprehensively understanding and actively considering your client's environment is a crucial social work skill. 

Habitat- A person's habitat includes the different physical places they inhabit, the social systems that they interact with and the formal and informal institutional affiliations they have. For example, a person's habitat might include their educational institution, their religious affiliation, their neighborhood, their friends, their professional environment and/or their family.

Niche- A niche describes that person's role in their habitat. People have multiple roles within their different habitats, providing them with contextual meanings. A person might derive self-worth and dignity from their functions or alternatively their niche might highlight oppressive and disenfranchising situations. Within an educational institution, someone might be an instructor, while simultaneously being a volunteer at their local food pantry. A person's niche contextualizes different hierarchies, contributes to their identity and modulates social and institutional interactions. 

Socially Engaged Art

Art and Activism

I mentioned my interest in the intersections between art and activism in my first blog post.  I want to take a moment to give this topic some more attention and provide some examples of artists who use their profession as a platform for social change.

The Yes Men

The Yes Men are often considered performance artists. In my mind they are primarily activists who use performance art, technology and social media to debunk corporate lies, bring awareness to environmental and human rights issues and thus incite social change. Their masterfully crafted "pranks" bring to light corporate abuses that otherwise might never make it to the main stream media. In the video above (a personal favorite) Andy Bichlbaum, one of the two Yes Men, is posing as Jude Finisterra a DOW Chemicals spokesman during an interview for the BBC. He claims responsibility for the Union Carbide Bhopal  gas leak in India, which killed and debilitated thousands of people living near the chemical plant. 


Ai Weiwei 

In light of social media's highlighted importance in Prof. Hawkin's Generalist Social Work Class, I thought Ai Weiwei's art would be especially relevant to discuss. Ai Weiwei has repeatedly stressed the role of social media in democracy, and much of his art relies on it. Via electronic collaboration and hands on community investigation, he gathered 5,000 student's names who perished during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, due to the collapse of poorly built government schools. In relation to this incident, he also published findings on corruption and the withholding of victim numbers and names by the government. His influential blog was blacklisted and blocked shortly after. In the recent documentary, Ai Weiwei, Never Sorry, he stresses the belief that all artist should be concerned with protecting freedom of expression. In his piece Sunflowers, installed at the Tate Modern, he commissioned 100 million hand painted porcelain sunflower seeds to be spread on the gallery's floor. This piece brings to light issues surrounding mass consumption, loss of identity and industrial labour. He is a globally influential figure who is constantly using his position to speak out for freedom of speech and expression. His TED talk (shown above) is worth watching.

Links to relevant projects -

Waiting for Godot New Orleans

Conflict Kitchen

Waffle Shop

And finally: A little bit of theory goes a long way -

"Questions emerge from the perception that social work and socially engaged art are interchangeable or at least that an action in one area may successfully become meaningful in another. It is true that in some cases a social work project that effects change in a positive manner in a community could also fall under the subject  of artwork. Similarly, an artist may share the same or similar values with a social worker, making some forms of SEA appear indistinguishable from social work, which further complicates the blurring between the two areas.
However, social work and SEA, while they operate in the same ecosystems and can look strikingly similar, differ widely in their goals. Social work is a value-based profession based on a tradition of beliefs and systems that aim for the betterment of humanity and support ideals such as social justice, the defense of human dignity and worth, and the strengthening of human relationships. An artist, in contrast, may subscribe to the same values but make work that ironizes, problematizes,and even enhances tensions around those subjects, in order to provoke reflection".
-Pablo Helguera from his book Education for Socially Engaged Art (page 35) 

Images of Social Work

What images do others have of social work as a profession?


In preparation for this blog entry I asked peers, strangers and relatives what they think a social worker's profession entails. As you might imagine, I did not receive an unanimous answer, although there was a recurring theme. The similarities mostly surrounded the notion that a social worker must have the capacity for empathy. Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines empathy as: "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner".   I will provide some background on three of the people I spoke to and summarize their images of social workers.

Betsy:A middle-aged woman who has weekly contact with the mental health system while caring for her mother suffering from severe major depressive disorder. Betsy was well aware of a Licensed Clinical Social Worker's role in administering psychotherapy. She is a very lively and personable woman, and thus had spoken to her mother's therapist on several occasions. The therapist once complained to her about the poor wages she was earning. Thus, due to this particular interaction, Betsy relayed to me that she felt social workers were probably underpaid. She also thought social workers could be found in many NGOs, adoption agencies, aid organizations, and public schools. 


Cassandra:
A young successful woman working at an investment bank who has had little exposure to the role of a social worker. Cassandra told me she had recently seen a TED video (Technology, Education and Design conferences whose content is shared online) by a social work professor and researcher at the University of Houston called Brené Brown. This video changed her view of the role of a social worker. Cassandra expressed she understood that the social work proffesion entailed research in a field she previously thought was primarily practiced by psychology researchers. I watched the TED videos afterwards, and listened to Brown talk about vulnerabilty, shame and empathy. She focused mostly on shame though, and I found these excerpts, from "Listening to shame" to be particularly relevant to a social worker: We "cannot talk about race without talking about privilege and when people start talking about privilege they get paralized by shame" & "Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, agression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders". I recommend viewing her TED talks:

Brené Brown: Listening to shame

Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability 

Ralph:
A young man who is finishing his PhD in Neuroscience. He expressed his conception of a social worker as someone who works one-on-one with people such as with children in a city school, adults trying to find employment, or as a caseworker in an urban setting. He also thought they work with groups of people such as a community organizers and activists lobbying on behalf of social justice concerns. He mentioned specifically that he imagined they could be "someone who knows how to effectively voice the concerns of a minority or disadvantaged group". Ralph's image of social work is a more popularly shared understanding of the profession, according to other people I spoke to during the past two weeks.   

This is the second time the term "social justice" has come up in this blog; thus I want to take the opportunity to define what I am referring to. I attempted to define it before reading about its historical background, and this is what I came up with: "An awareness of multiple forms of oppression and the lack of equality on the micro to the macro scale. The individual, institutional and global support of rights and policies for all people to access their culture, religion & language, to economic empowerment, education, health care, democracy, dignity, self expression and self actualization." 

Michael Reisch's "Defining Social Justice in a Socially Unjust World" from Families in Society introduced me to this topic's extensive background and contemporary significance. I felt an affinity towards the liberal view which "focuses on the distribution of benefits and burdens and the protection of persons' rights particularly at the level of individuals and others, it also involves the assignment of fundamental rights and duties, economic opportunities and social conditions, and incorporates a principle of compensation or redress (p. 350)." I found redress particularly relevant within the liberal approach to social justice. Reisch explains what John Rawls coined the "principle of redress", as the philosophical foundation for further distribution of wealth and power in order to compensate for inequalities outside of one's control.  This was a daunting exercise and I am certain of its imperfection. In fact, I was hesitant to post this initial definition, but I decided to label it a work in progress allowing me to revisit in the near future.

Origins

What brings you to social work?

Where have you been?

Where are you going?

Social Work has the potential to combine several interests: social justice, mental health and art. I studied Psychology and Fine Arts and was interested in following a career in clinical psychology and maintaining a studio practice in conceptual art in the mediums of painting, sculpture and video. I am interested in psychotherapy and counseling, and I believe it is fundamental for a society to provide readily available access to mental health practices. Social Work emerges as a field I hope to contextualize and build upon these interests. I am currently a MSW (Masters in Social Work) student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Similar to the notion that access to mental health treatment should be universal, I also believe access to art and vehicles for free expression are fundamental. Perhaps this idea is better explained as the possibility for an individual to express her or himself and to share her or his artistic practice. I participated in creating and teaching a free process oriented art program for children in Chinatown called Upstairs83 (more information is available on our kickstarter page and website). This collective continues to offer art education that goes beyond a product oriented approach to art making. We were deeply influenced by reading, Pablo Helguera's book "Education for Socially Engaged Art" (http://www.pintobooks.com/newbooks20ESEA.html). I am inspired by examples of how art and social activism intersect in order to address and combat oppression. 

image credit: upside-down-map.com

I was born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brasil, where daily exposure to blatant inequalities stirred up frustrations surrounding apathy and injustice. While poverty might be more  invisible in the "first world", it is far more difficult to ignore in Sao Paulo. Being from the “Global South” has certainly shaped my understanding of the connections between neo-colonialism, oppression and poverty. While still living in Brasil, I participated in a project at the Western most tip of the country, in an Amazon Rainforest state called Acre. We developed a conference and educational seminars where over 50 teachers were brought together in the town of Thaumaturgo to improve educational conditions via peer exchange. Seminars were held based on chapters of the book “Where there is No Doctor” by David Werner. We delivered basic school, art and first aid supplies to approximately 55 schools. Another key experience that lead me to the Social Work profession was volunteering at an NGO in Ghana called Pro-Link, counseling recently rescued child trafficking victims and  assisting their academic and social transitions back in to the community. I found myself thinking about how strength and creativity can emerge in the most adverse circumstances. 

I don't yet know where my MSW will lead me, but I will continue to be influenced by the themes I have discussed in this post. I look forward to learning more about Clinical Social Work and sharing some insights on this blog, though I am open and excited to learn about Social Work in its diverse capacities and implementations.