Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services

Although collaboration is ubiquitous to social work, this article is the first to consider “collaboration” as a unifying method for all fields of social work practice and as appropriate to current sociopolitical practice contexts. From interdisciplinary and social work literatures, the authors propose a definition fitting for social work practice and discuss necessary conditions, attributes, and phases, as well as a case example.

As we enter the new millennium, traditional social work values and interventions can effectively improve the fragmented and often inaccessible service delivery systems that children and families utilize. While social workers have always taken the lead in emphasizing the strengths perspective, empowerment of clients, a bio-psychosocial approach, community-based services, and services across the life span, human service agencies and providers have not uniformly embraced these concepts. Community agencies often duplicate services, lack user-friendly or accessible resources, and often provide only fragmented services to children and families. This article examines a Family Support Model that embraces and integrates social work values and concepts in efforts to provide quality, community-based, client-driven, and outcome-based services to children and families. While the Family Support Model originated within public administration and social policy circles, the natural compatibility between social work values and the model's key components are presented. The author advocates for the replication of the model in other communities and identifies the considerations and challenges inherent in this type of collaborative effort.

This article integrates key concepts of a strengthsnbased practice approach and social work practice with people with mental retardation and their families. Principles of a strengths approach are discussed with its impact on the engagement process, nature of the worker-client relationship, assessment, process of change, and disengagement process in working with people with mental retardation and their families. Examples of a creative application of the model are discussed. Obstacles to incorporating this practice approach into agency-based practice are addressed.

This article provides a review of research addressing the role of home and child care responsibility in the psychological adjustment of siblings of children with disabilities, as defined by special education law. Early classic studies are reviewed followed by more recent work on gender and SES of the sibling, the relationship of sibling responsibility to adjustment and the level of home and child care responsibility for siblings with and without a brother/sister who has a disability. The author concludes that neither the existence of higher levels of responsibility for siblings of children with disabilities nor the classification of responsibility as a psychological risk factor have been established. In studies that Included comparison groups, girls had more home and child care responsibility than boys, whether or not there was a child with a disability in the home. However, the sibling's worry about future responsibility and cognitions about the responsibility that does exist are worthy of further exploration. Clinicians are advised to consider the issue of responsibility and how it is viewed by family members in work with families of children who have disabilities, and to be aware of cultural and religious characteristics of the family as they pertain to the issue of family responsibility for its members.

This study aimed to investigate how mental health professionals experience and cope with the same stressor that affects their clients. It focuses on Israeli mental health professionals who live and work in the West Bank and were exposed to long periods of terror during the Palestinian uprising (the Intifada) and to the threat of possible relocation based on the Oslo Agreement.

The sample included fourteen women and eleven men, representing about 15% of the Israeli mental health professionals who live and work among Jewish populations in the West Bank. Data were collected in April 1995 during the government of the left-wing regime, when the stress of possible relocation was very intense. The results, based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, indicate that being marginalized is an important aspect of creating the stress. Commitment to the goal was found to be the stronger variable affecting coping. As for gender differences, the quantitative results and part of the qualitative results supported the “role constraint” hypothesis. However, both males and females of the mental health professions were found to experience their response to stress and to use coping strategies according to the “socialization” hypothesis.

Swidler “tool-kit” metaphor is a resource for understanding culture and its influence. Concepts and propositions related to tools, took kits, strategies of action, social frameworks for action, the continuum of tool awareness, and settled/unsettled social circumstances are summarized. The approach is compared to the culture as a values framework. Farkas' application of this cultural resources model to at-risk, ethnically diverse students and their families is summarized.

This paper presents an approach to crisis intervention and brief treatment for young children based on the new psychology, intrapsychic humanism. After presenting central theoretical principles, these principles are applied and treatment guidelines demonstrated in the treatment process of a three-year-old child named Paul. The research design for the case study is naturalistic uses qualitative methods of data analysis, and draws from the heuristic paradigm (a postpositivist metatheory of social and behavioral research).

With the passage of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the nation's welfare system for poor women and their children was fundamentally transformed. These profound changes have the potential to dramatically alter the nature of state and local welfare agencies and to create new and expanded roles for human service workers, including social workers, both within public welfare agencies and other community agencies. This article reviews the major provisions of TANF and its implications for state welfare agencies and recipients. Roles for human service workers in public welfare are delineated for direct practice, management staff development policy analysis and advocacy, and research.