Component of case work

Last Updated on July 17, 2024 by Muzammil Ijaz

Component of case work,The social case work is the integrity of different elements and a material which forms the nucleus of the social case work. The nucleus is the crucial part that consists of different component while social case works practice. The practitioner has to understand each and every component of the nucleus of social case work to carry out better intervention process. There are five components of social case work known as 5 p’s.

1. The person

2. The problem

3. The place

4.The process

5. Professionalism

1. The Person

The person is a man, woman or child or anyone who finds himself/herself, or is found to be, in need of help in some aspect of his social-emotional living, whether the need be for tangible provisions or counsel. As he/ she begin to receive help, he/she is called a “client”. A client is one who seeks professional help, one who employs the help of another or one who is served by a social agency or an institution. The person live in environment and interact in the environment is influenced by physical, social, cultural, economic and political aspects. The main aim of social case worker is to facilitate the individual to adopt, to restore, to reshape or to reinforce his functioning as a social being. The client is a person with both needs and a problem(s). The problem may be related to a client. The person’s behavior has purpose and meaning to gain satisfaction, to avoid and dissolve frustration and to maintain his/her balance- in- movement. To understand a person, it is important to know his/her parts of personality that is the person’s behavior. To understand human behavior and individual difference, Grace Mathew has given the points like:

1. An individual behavior is the result of his/her experience. Behavior is his/her reaction, feeling, thinking etc. with the surrounding.

2. For growth and development of human, it is essential to meet certain basic needs (according to Maslow).

3. Emotional needs are real and they can be met or removed through intellectual reasoning.

4. Behavior is purposeful and is in response to the individual physical and emotional needs.

5. Other person’s behavior can be understood only in terms of one’s own emotional and intellectual aspect.

According to the Sigmund Freud, the process of human personality is the combination of id, ego and super ego. To understand a person it is necessary to understand the personality of the individual that is substitute into 3 parts.

• Id: It is unconscious which is known as the life force in the individual that is the combination of energy and needs. This drives him to wants and to will. All our motives are in the interest of our biological and psychological aspects. As a person behavior achieves his goal, he experiences satisfactions both consciously and unconsciously.

• Ego: It is the person’s mental image a kind of selfexpectations hope to solve the conflict. It is to mobilize and experience feeling in the way that are satisfying to the self and to external world.

• Super ego: super ego is a dynamic system of the prohibitions, expectations, standards, values and ideas which a person has in relation to other individuals and to his society. It guides the individual.

2. The Problem

Problem, according to the America Heritage dictionary is a “question or situation that presents uncertainty, perplexity or difficulty”. This definition is rather inadequate without elaboration for defining in this chapter. Human beings face difficulties in day-to-day living, many of which are handled adequately with resources at hand. These are difficulties of living that fall within our coping abilities and strategies. When difficulties assume dimensions that strain our coping capacity and go beyond our competence in handling, they become problems. People who seek casework service are those who encounter problems. Problems of living may be caused by unmet physical or psychosocial needs or by the inability to perform one’s social roles owing to any causes. Physical needs pertain to the biological needs of food, shelter, clothing, and the psychosocial needs pertain to love, recognition, security, opportunities for not only intellectual and emotional growth but also for fulfillment of one’s potential. A problem which defies an individual’s coping skills may be the end result or derivative of other problems or difficulties that remain unsolved from an earlier point of time. A human problem cannot be considered an isolated happening or an entity in itself. It is usually the end point or one point in a chain of cause-effect relationships. The problems reported by clients to the agency, or in other words, problems for which help was sought, may be classified in different ways.

According to Grace Mathew the problems can be categorized as follows:

1. Problems related to illness or disabilities

2. Problems due to lack of material resources

3. School related problems

4. Problems related to institutionalization

5. Behavior problems

6. Problems of marital discord

7. Problem situations needing a follow-up service

8. Needs related to rehabilitation of people handicapped by disabilities

9. Predicaments and difficulties of clients caught up in problems that have been regarded as social problems like gambling, prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction and unmarried motherhood.

3. The Place

The place is a social service agency or a social service department of another kind of human welfare agency. The place to which the individual with problem reach for help is called social agency. The agency is an organization designed to express the will of the society or some group of people in society welfare. Its purpose is to help individuals with the particular social handicaps which hampers good personal or family living and with the problems created by faulty person-to-person, person to-group or person-to situation relationships. This agency’s purpose and functions come to life in the person and professional performance of the case worker. Social case work agencies differ one from the other in a number of ways, and they depend upon the factors like money, knowledge and competence of staff in agency, interest, resources available and community support etc. but there are three major factors that determine their classification:

1. Their source of support-; public taxation (child welfare, physical and mental health programs etc.) or voluntary contribution.

2. Their source of professional authority-; primary agencies carry full authority and responsibility for their social functions and secondary agencies derive their authority and responsibility from the host agency.

3. Their special function and area of concern-; primary agencies both public and private, may define certain areas of social need as the particular fielding in which they give services. Secondary, case work help is related to the work of some other profession, such as medicine, education or law and to its specific knowledge and purpose. Perlman has described some of the characteristic of the organization.

1. An agency embodies a society’s decision to protect its members against social breakdowns, to prevent their maladjustments and/or to promote the development of better or higher levels of humans functioning.

2. Each social agency develops a program by which to meet the particular areas of need with which it sets out to deal. 3. The structure of an agency identifies and assigns separate and joint responsibilities, authorities and tasks to each personnel and demarcates the relationship among various functions in the total agency body.

4. The social agency is a living, adaptable organism susceptible to being understood and changed, much as other living organisms

5. Every staff member in an agency speaks and acts for some part of the agency’s function, and the case worker represents the agency in its individualized problem-solving help.

6. The case worker, while representing his/her agency, is first and foremost a representative of his/her profession.

4. Process

The process in case work is a progressive transaction between the professional helper (the case worker) and the client. It consists of a series of problem solving operations carried out within a meaningful relationship. The end of this process is contained in its meaning: to influence the client person that he/she develops effectiveness in coping with his/her problem and /or to so influence the problem as to resolve it or reduce its effects. Social work problem solving is finding a way through feeling, thinking, and acting. It progresses over time in a cyclical, irreversible manner that is focused on removing blocks to need fulfillment that individuals cannot remove with their own resources. In order to understand what the case work process must include in its problem-solving help, it is necessary for the social case worker to take stock first of the kinds of blockings which occur in people’s normal problem-solving effort. These six factors are among the most common:

1. A problem cannot be solved if the necessary tangible means and resources are not available to the person.

2. Sometimes, people are unable to solve their problems simply out of ignorance or misapprehension about the facts of the problems or the facts of existing ways of meeting it.

3. If a person is drenched by emotional or physical strength. He/she needs to mobilize himself/herself.

4. When problems sets off a conflagration of feeling, a person’s thought processes, delicately attuned as they are to his/her emotions become clouded and tumbled about.

5. Some people find problems in solving a difficult situation because they have never developed systematic habits of orderly methods of thinking and planning. In the case work relationship, a constant medium is provided that is accepting, nurturing and supporting at the same time that the stimulus of problem-solving work is injected to promote the client’s effort to feel, to be or to act in the ways leading to his/her better social adjustment. There are various methods and phases in problem solving process like:

1. Preliminary statement of the problem.

2.Statement of preliminary assumptions about the nature of the problem.

3. Selection and collection of information.

4. Analysis of information available.

5. Development of a plan.

6. Implementation of the plan.

7. Evaluation of the plan.

6. Professionalism

Relationship between any two people is the condition of their being connected in a significant way. We experience various kinds of relationships in our lives. Parent-child, sibling-sibling, uncle-niece relationships are examples. These are permanent and unalterable, lasting as long as one lives. On the other hand, relationships between two friends, neighbors or classmates are temporary. The doctor-patient, teacher-student, supervisor – supervisee, lawyer-client are examples of professional relationships. One can broadly classify relationships according to quality also. It follows from the above discussion that the social workerclient relationship is a professional relationship, and that it has to be positive in nature. Only a positive relationship can serve as a means towards the desirable end of helpfulness, the type of helpfulness that provides scope for the exercise of casework principles. During a process of social case work a relationship is built between client and social case worker which is professional in nature for certain time until the client recover its strength and become self-dependent. Professional relationships have some common characteristics. They are bound by time to specific purposes. When the purpose is met, the relationship comes to an end. This professionalism involves the process of sharing responsibilities, recognition of others rights, acceptance of difference to stimulate interaction to solve problem of the client