Introduction to Social Work



Chapter 9. Strengths, Narrative, and Solution Practice

These three perspectives share a common focus. They reject ‘problem-solving’ and instead adopt forward-looking approaches to help the individual. These three perspectives help clients and families re-imagine apparent problems by looking at their own present strengths and thus allowing them to build more positively for the future. A key component for these perspectives is building resilience so as to strengthen the ability to move forward. Many of the ideas from these perspectives these ideas are being adopted by empowerment and critical theories.

Terminology

Deconstruction This idea drawn from arts and literature takes apart a situation by analyzing its elements, and then identifies the sources of power that made those elements important to the situation.

Discourse This approach explores situations by examining the language used by the people involved. By doing so, practitioners understand the different positions that people express or demonstrate about the situation. In turn, this process exposes the tensions and systems of mutual support.

Exceptions These are successful behaviors in people’s repertoires that practitioners amplify to overcome perceived problems in people’s lives.

Miracle question The miracle question helps clients clearly identify their objectives; ‘if there were a miracle and this problem was solved overnight, how would you know the miracle had happened when you woke up in the morning?’

Narrative The narrative includes that way in which the person telling about their life selects aspects of that life or event as well as the language used to present the narrative. An awareness and analysis of how the story is constructed makes it possible to identify alternative constructions that provide the potential for change.

Scaling Clients and practitioners use scaling to be specific about their aims and achievements.

Personal versus social constructs Personal constructs are individual perspectives; social constructs correspond with shared social realities.

Social construction of reality Shared social constructions contribute to socializing individuals into social groups and society; problems occurs when a social group makes a problematic claim and requires social and political action. Thus, their problematic status is created by ‘claims-making.’

Modernist Social work is often regarded as modernist when it represents universal and timeless humanistic ideas that people in an ordered society are responsible for others and manage their lives in a rational manner using evidence-based practice drawing on knowledge gained through positivist scientific methods.

Post-modernist This approach includes a set of ideas that practitioners should not look only at modernist ideas but alternatives and a set of social trends emphasizing that practitioners should be open to engaging with alternatives rather than a single set of social assumptions. The main implication of postmodernist is that practitioners can always find alternatives to any system of social thinking.

Key Ideas

A major strength of these approaches is the emphasis on the positive.

These perspectives emphasize building non-judgmentally on the positives and achievements in people’s lives. Rather than concentrating on the negative, the practitioner extends their advantages, offers alternative perspectives and thus reduces the importance of the deficits in their lives. Thus these perspectives are a powerful source of the shared value principle of working toward positive objectives, alliance, and rights. An important social work source of these ideas lies in Saleeby’s strengths perspective and its four principles: every individual, family, group and community has strengths; troubles are opportunities; don’t assume limitations and listen to aspirations; and remember that people are best served by collaboration.

XXA Social psychology, social construction, and postmodernism aided growth.

These three approaches contributed to the perspectives in this chapter. For example, all three rely and combine social construction and postmodernist thinking with social psychology. Social psychology studies how interaction within social groups as well as between groups helps to create and maintain the social identities of individuals. This includes ideas about how people behave in relation to and their influence on others and the effects of social factors such as stigma, stereotyping, and ideology on behavior in groups. Social psychology focuses on the effects of communications such as the use by social workers of language to influence clients. Role theory explores the creation of roles as a process of constructing ourselves in a place of social relations. Structural-functional role theory examines social structures. Dramaturgical role theory sees roles as ‘enactments’ of the social expectations attached to social status. These social psychological theories produce interesting analyses but do not offer useful practice prescription or directions for practice.

XXB Social construction ideas were crucial to extending social work’s ideas.

The impact of social construction and postmodernist ideas in the 1990s was crucial in extending social work’s use of ideas from social psychology. Social construction ideas proposed that people learn about the world as they experience the culture and history of their society by developing shared understanding and interpretations of the world as it affects them. These patterns of social relations create shared expectations. Such theories were attractive since they offered the possibility of achieving changes in behavior by changing social structures around clients and changing perceptions of and interactions about social expectations.

XXC Social construction and individual construction differ.

Personal construct theory suggests that each person manages behavior according to constructs or pictures of the situation in their minds; looking at and changing those constructs helps change behavior. Thus personal constructs are individual perspectives and social constructs corresponds with shared social realities where people build up shared pictures of the world from social interactions with each other using language and creating shared ideas expressed in language set in social and historical contexts. Thus these interactions provide for a person a sense of what they regard as real; practice based on these ideas is often called ‘constructivist’. This practice focused on how the shared picture has built up and how the impact of such shared conceptions or the context in which they have their effects may have changed.

XXD Claims-making is a special case in the social construction of reality.

Claims-making shows how groups create social constructions about particular aspects of our social life. Social problems arise when a social group successfully makes a claim about a social issue that is problematic and requires social and political action—social problems are not themselves problematic but claims-making creates their problematic status. One example of this is the nature of human categories such as the social assumptions and behavior of women and ‘natural’ female characteristics such as caring or the roles of social worker and client as being asymmetrical when more complex relationships are possible.

Social construction is in contrast to traditional social work’s modernist approach.

Traditional approaches to social work are often criticized as modernist or focused on assumed universal and timeless humanistic ideas that people in an ordered society are responsible for one another thus disallowing the alternative interpretations of social construction of ideas. Human beings are assumed to be able and should be able to manage their lives using rational thought, evidence-based practice approaches, and drawing on knowledge gained by positivist scientific methods—thus allowing the world to be known through observation and experiment and explained by ‘grand narratives’ that explain human life and the development of society in a general way.

XXF Postmodernism suggests alternatives rather than a single set of social assumptions.

The main implication of postmodernist thinking for social workers is that practitioners can always find alternatives to any system of social thinking. Postmodernism argues that the world and human beings can not be understood rationally by evidence built up into one overall perspective of human society; the approaches argues against the modernist perspective that there are universal and timeless humanistic ideas that people are responsible for others, manage their lives using rational minds, and that helping can and should be based on evidence-based practice drawing from knowledge gained from positivist scientific methods. Thus postmodernism argues against research relying on rational analysis and external observation leading to ‘grand narratives’ that offer a strategy to explain life in a general way. As a result, postmodernism suggests that practitioners can always find alternatives to any system of social thinking—an interpretivists approach that sees knowledge as biased and calls for a need for practitioners to choose natural and social events to observe and investigate.

XXG Postmodernism includes deconstruction and discourse.

Deconstruction begins in the arts and literature from the approach to understanding a situation by taking it apart to see the elements clearly. Communications contains a message relevant to a particular situation, and also a message or analysis about how communication and analysis are carried out in this setting and also a message about the nature of the setting or social institution within which the communication is occurring. Understanding that communication allows the practitioner to identify important aspects of social relationships such as use of power among groups.

These perspectives provide important links among other theories and models.

The strengths, narrative, and solution perspectives make important links between therapeutic psychological models and practice and postmodernist social construction theories, which in turn link to and have influenced critical and feminist ideas. These perspectives maintain the trend in present-day psychology and psychotherapy to define and work on specific behaviors while they also shift the focus in CBT and task-centered practice from looking for problematic behaviors towards looking for specific behavioral objectives in the future. As a result, people who like the specificity of CBT often remain comfortable with these perspectives even though they incorporate more flexible and interpretive techniques.

XXH These theories present values issues for practitioners.

The first one is that the social work profession is expected to enforce the accepted moral expectations of the people that it works with in the profession’s social order role. The second issue is that the moral response to this may be refusing to blame people when they have no responsibility and working to improve the situation. Some writers suggest that postmodernist thinking therefore requires a moral and political relativism, which argues that nothing can be known or finally agreed. However, postmodernism actual argues that practitioners seek out and examine alternative ways of seeing what we know about and what we expect. Looking at possible alternatives allows practitioners to test the completeness of their know. Moreover, when no alternative explanations are found, postmodernist thinking encourages seeking more complete understandings that may suggest that several alternatives may be true. Rather than rejecting social order and social structure, postmodernism accepts that social order is valuable and necessary but suggests alternatives. As a result, postmodernism suggests that practitioners explore debates and discourses about important issues in society so that they can follow trends of issues of concern and thus better understand who has power and influence in society.

Issues

Some writers argue that these perspectives suffer from three limitations.

While these perspectives are positive, being positive does not sufficiently recognize the reality that clients and people around them experience damaging problems. In addition, the social control role of many social work agencies as well as the social mandate for social work interventions comes from demands for people to manage their behavior appropriately. Finally, the reliance on linguistic interpretations and changing people’s perspectives on their problems makes these approaches inappropriate for persistent and serious social problems and for busy agencies dealing with people with difficult, multiple, problems. The arguments against these issues include the argument that failing to focus on clients’ priorities is wrong ethically as well as lessening their will to participate. As a result, the practitioner’s assessment may be unsatisfactory because a complete picture of the situation cannot be obtained.

These perspectives also suffer from poorly defined and empirically limited support.

Focus on strengths in all three perspectives is poorly defined and empirically supported only anecdotes and case studies rather than by rigorous research. Presentations of narrative and solution practice overestimate the practice effect in very deprived and excluded communities; research on solution-focused therapy is not clearly supportive and the outcomes appear to be even less when there are insufficient resources, professional supervision, or skill in precisely implementing these theories.

Final thoughts…

All three perspectives have been used with a full range of clients and research validation in care management. They require a forward-looking focus on positive outcomes desired by clients that connect with shared value principles and enabling clients to be in control. As these perspectives draw on postmodern social construction theory, they accept that people can change if their understanding of their social experience changes. Social workers aim to help them achieve these social objectives by practice that is respectful of the clients’ own objectives and acknowledges the need to engage people in making their own changes and incorporating their own objectives in to wider social outcomes. The major criticism includes that they are overly optimistic of client success where severe adversity and social exclusion affects the community.

The most important features of practice within these perspectives include:

• Drawing out people’s own narratives of their lives and objectives in working with the practitioner;

• Working to identify personal strengths and enabling social niches in clients’ lives;

• Identifying positive exceptions to patterns of life that people can amply to develop their own strengths;

• Looking for clients’ own solutions by getting them to observe the success in their own lives;

• Setting forward-moving tasks that aim toward useful, desire objectives;

• Maintaining a forward impetus by working with clients to identify solutions and strengths;

• Maintaining a positive focus on outcomes; and,

• Using techniques that maintain clients’ forward-looking and positive objectives.

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