Social Work With Groups - The Group As The Unit of Social Work Practice

The Group As The Unit of Social Work Practice

A common conceptualization of the small group drawn from the social work literature is as

“a social system consisting of two or more persons who stand in status and role relationships with one another and possessing a set of norms or values which regulate the attitudes and behaviors of the individual members in matters of consequence to the group. A group is a statement of relationship among person. Therefore, social systems have structure and some degree of stability, interaction, reciprocity, interdependence and group bond. Open social systems do not exist in a vacuum; they are part of and transact with… their surroundings….” (Klein, 1972, pp.125-126).

For Schwartz (1971), the group was most simply, “a collection of people who need each other in order to work on certain common tasks, in an agency hospitable to those tasks” (p. 7):)

Read more about this topic:  Social Work With Groups

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