What Makes Social Work Part I

The reason why I'm inspired to talk about this is because my classmates and I are given a task to write a paper by a lecturer of ours on the integrated focus of social work and why it is important in ensuring the effectiveness of the intervention programs a social worker develops for his or her client.

Social work is based on a lot of other disciplines in social sciences. It is based on the theories and perspectives from psychology, sociology, political science, and even economics. But what differentiates social work from the rest of them? If social work is mostly nothing new, then why the need of the development of the practice? Well, I could answer it from the integrated part of the practice and field.

A social worker who is serious in his or her job should understand that an individual is comprised of a lot of factors. There's the psychological part, the social part, the emotional part, etc. The different field in social science deals with the different factors that make a person, and social work tries to synthesize the understanding and analysis so a person can be understood in holistic manner.

In systems theory, it is asserted that an individual is situated in a place where there are layers of interactions. There is a layer between an individual and him- or herself. There is another one that involves the person with the family, or the friends, or the colleagues from the workplace. There is also the interaction between the people in his or her life, such as between the family and the workplace. Then, there is a larger layer that consists of the political system, culture, and demography of the person. All this, according to Urie Bronfenbrenner specifically, who developed the ecological theory, have an impact on a person's life and how he or she is grown.

Therefore, understanding a system that a person lives in is the important part of social work, that somehow differentiates social work from other disciplines. This "integratedness" shows how important for a country to develop the knowledge and practice within it, and train a lot of practitioners to be skillful in this field.