The four themes that can be singled out in this article could be as follows:
- Basic notion of social work and workers
- Main types of social work
- The stages of different types of social work
- Capacities and skills necessary for social workers.
The work of social workers consists first of all of values and principles the social workers live by. This is as well the source of their motivation.
We should separate three fields where their social work is actually implemented:
- for individuals;
- for groups;
- for community.
We are talking about these three fields from the year 1940s. It is clear that the first type of work relates to the social work with one person, the second one – to the work with a group, a peer group or a family for example, and at last the third one – to the help in planning social procedures for a local community.
Another term for social work with individuals is social case work, but it is rarely used. We would meet this type of social work more often as the others, the main goal of it is to help individuals to solve their problems, they are supposed to do it on a one to one basis with the social worker.
Usually the social worker starts with intake, during this step a person informs that he needs help and the social worker decides upon the methods that will be used to help him.
During the next stage the person who needs help and the social worker work out the plan to help the client to overcome the problem.
The stage when the actions actually take place is called intervention stage.
The last stage will be – evaluation stage – it is a really important part of the social work as the social worker and the client are able to evaluate whether they managed to achieve the goals they had at the beginning.
There are some cases when a social worker might come to the conclusion that group work would be more appropriate, for example when the aim is to help the whole family. Social work in groups is as well implemented at some institutions for people with disabilities or for former prisoners or some other types of treatment centers.
There are 5 stages for social work with groups:
- orientation stage – a group is gathered;
- authority stage – setting of the relations between the members of the group;
- negotiation stage – members of the group start to share their ideas;
- functional stage – members of the group concentrate on solving the problems together;
- disintegration stage – the group stops to exist as a unity as soon as the problem is solved.
The last type of social work mentioned above is community work. There are three main types of community: geographic, membership and self-help community.
All these types of work are really important for our society and they do demand some special skills and knowledge from the social workers along with their developed human qualities.
1. Social work with individuals, groups and communities.
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