Primary Rationale For Group Services in Social Work
Opportunities for mutual aid to be found in the group encounter offer the major rationale for the provision of group services by social workers. Gitterman (2006), a social work educator and group work scholar has elaborated on the role of mutual aid in the small group noting that “as members become involved with one another, they develop helping relationships and become invested in each other and in participating in the group" (p. 93). The mutual aid processes that unfold help group members "to experience their concerns and life issues as universal," to "reduce isolation and stigma," to "offer and receive help from each other," and to "learn from each other’s views, suggestions and challenges" (Gitterman, 2006, p. 93).
Not only do group services offer opportunities for social support as Toseland and Siporin (1986) explain "there is also an important helper therapy principle that operates in groups” (p. 172). Toseland and Siporin (1986) elaborate: “clients are able to help others and in so doing receive help for themselves" (p. 172).
Read more about this topic: Social Work With Groups
Famous quotes containing the words social work, primary, group, services, social and/or work:
“Whether in the field of health, education or welfare, I have put my emphasis on preventive rather than curative programs and tried to influence our elaborate, costly and ill- co-ordinated welfare organizations in that direction. Unfortunately the momentum of social work is still directed toward compensating the victims of our society for its injustices rather than eliminating those injustices.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Wilful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.... No man, no woman, can shirk the primary duties of life, whether for love of ease and pleasure, or for any other cause, and retain his or her self-respect.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
“We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for the salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.... Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)