What Makes for Successful Groupwork? A Survey of Agencies in the UK

Summary This paper reports the findings of a survey of Social ServicesDepartments, Probation Services and the major voluntary agenciesin the UK. The survey aimed to shed light on the factors whichpromote successful groups in social work and probation agencies.The survey did not attempt to map the extent of current groupwork.A questionnaire was piloted in a Social Services Departmentin northern England with social work and social care practitionersparticipating in ‘The Groupwork Project’, a trainingand development programme which continues to have as its aimthe establishment of a groupwork service in a mainstream socialservices agency. The survey was designed to be illuminativeand exploratory rather than conclusive. In this paper, the authorsreflect on the research process and on the findings of the survey.These findings point to the complexity of factors consideredsignificant to the success of a group, and to the importanceof contextual factors in establishing and sustaining a groupworkservice.     

Consultancy to groupwork programmes for adult male sex offenders: some reflections on knowledge and processes

Summary This paper, drawing on the author's own experience, exploresthe role of consultancy in developing groupwork programmes foradult male sex offenders. It reviews models of consultancy andconsiders their applicability to this particular area of work.It considers what knowledge and experience are relevant to thisarea of work. It addresses issues relating to values, knowledge,gender and race both in developing programmes and in selectingconsultants. It considers how the focus and style of a consultancycan change during a period of work. Additionally, issues specificallyrelated to groupwork with sex offenders and how it may affectworkers are considered. In conclusion, the positive potentialfor this work is asserted.     

Towards Accountability in Social Work: One Year's Intake to an Area Office

Summary Monitoring one year's referrals to an area office of a socialservices department, we found that of the 2,436 referrals representing2,057 cases, about half were already known to the area office.Demographically the clientele fell largely into three groups—theelderly, young families and children. The main problem groupingsconsisted of those with physical disabilities or suffering fromfrailty in old age, those with financial and environmental problems,and families with disturbed relationships and child care problems.Most of the clients had short-term help and at the end of sixmonths only 11% of the referrals were still open. Distinctive profiles emerged when comparing the routes by whichclients with different types of problems reached the area officeand the help they got once they had passed its threshold: (a) The elderly and disabled, mainly referred by the healthservices, received predominantly practical help. (b) Those with financial and material problems, largely self-referred,received information, advice and referral to other agencies. (c) The disturbed families, referred by many different sources,received detailed exploration, assessment and casework. Those clients who were passed on for more extended help to thelong-term teams—some 10% of the intake—were mainlythe very vulnerable elderly and disabled persons, and childrenwho had been taken into care or who were in need of surveillanceand protection for other reasons. The study raises questions about the methods of service deliveryin response to the demands made on the area office and discussespossible changes in approach towards more community-orientedpreventive work.     

The Effort Involved in Finding Employment for White-Collar Offenders

Summary Ex-offenders are notoriously difficult to place into employment.However, the efforts needed to help such clients find work varyenormously and an important question to consider is whetherit is more appropriate to help a larger number of clients bylimiting the amount of placing effort for each client or tocontinue to try to assist those who prove much more difficultplacing propositions. The present study indicates some of thepotential dangers in concentrating upon short-term aid and thefindings have relevant implications for other areas of socialwork where there is a need to ration efforts made on behalfof clients. The present paper also stresses that the difficultiesof while-collar es-offenders finding work have not been fullyrecognized by other comtnentators.     

The Significance of the Early Stage of Illness as a Focus for Social Work Help

Summary This paper considers the experience of illness as a series ofinterrelated phases, in which the beginning phase which is thetransition from health to illness is shown to have special significance.The common responses to this stage of illness are denial, welcomeor inertia, each of which may give some forewarning of problemsthat may be encountered later in the illness. Traditionallysocial work help has focused onto the acute or convalescentstages, but it is suggested here that the beginning phase ofillness offers a rewarding point for intervention, not onlywhen opening new cases, but also among clients who are alreadyknown and where health problems may interact with other problems.The implications of this are explored both for agency policyas well as an added dimension of diagnostic understanding ofindividual clients no matter what the agency     

Social Work Intervention in Community Service

Gill McIvor, Research Fellow, Social Work Research Centre, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA. Summary The recently introduced National Standards for Community Serviceschemes in Scotland recognize that certain offenders on CommunityService may experience personal difficulties that interferewith their ability to comply with the order of the court andrecommend that where necessary advice and help should be providedto assist completion. A study of twelve Scottish Community Serviceschemes revealed that in spite of their often being acceptedfor Community Service because of the absence of obvious instabilityin their lives, many offenders encountered personal difficultieswhile completing their orders and those who did had a higherincidence of absence from placement. The relatively few instancesof intervention by Community Service staff that were found weremainly of a practical nature. Two schemes were, however, identifiedas offering a more intensive social work service which may haveenabled certain offenders who would not otherwise have doneso to complete their Community Service Orders. The practicalimplications of increased intervention by Community Servicestaff are discussed as is the possibility that such an approachmight enable schemes to deal successfully with a higher proportionof offenders who would otherwise have received a custodial sentence.     

Public Attitudes to Problem Definition and Problem Solving: A Pilot Study

Summary An attempt is made to discover how people define their problemsand on what basis they decide when, and from where, to seekhelp. The focus is upon legal problems since the study formspart of a wider project concerned with the provision of legalservices. Ignorance and misinformation concerning the availabilityof both social and legal services, combined with apathy andresignation on the part of many who need help, are importantfactors determining the non-use of services. Nor can people'sneeds be neatly categorized as social or legal. The overlappingnature of their problems exists at a structural as well as anindividual level; many of the legal problems experienced byindividuals arise from inequalities in the social and economicstructure of society.     

Towards an Alternative Model of Social Groupwork

Summary This paper arose from our disagreement with some of the suggestionsin an earlier article in this journal (Brown et al., 1982).Before and since, we have both worked in and studied numerousexamples of groups of a type which, according to Brown and hiscoauthors, scarcely exists in British social work practice.This paper explains what we believe to be the actual significanceof the type of group work we refer to as ‘self-directed’,together with our view of its place within wider social work,community work, and groupwork practice. We also give examplesof such groups and conclude that their proliferation would enableworkers to go beyond the alleviation of individual distressinto the achievement of external change.     

The Limits of Radical Social Work

Summary Doubts raised by research evaluation of traditional caseworkhave been increased by the perception by radical social workersthat some clients' difficulties derive from their involvementwith state machinery rather than personal capacity or circumstances,and that many can be helped by working collectively with othersin their community rather than striving alone in a dependentrelationship with a caseworker. Radical aspirations, however,assume that all clients have the capacity to overcome theirdifficulties and that none are so damaged as to be able realisticallybarely to cope with them. The radicals' doubts about the usefulnessof individual support and emphasis on collective self help raisethe danger of neglecting those who are unable to participateeffectively and gain from such efforts.     

Group Work in Intermediate Treatment

Summary This article is concerned with the development of group workin a specialist intermediate treatment project. Using the techniqueof participant observation the author describes the use madeof groups over a six-month period with young people, all ofwhom presented problems of disturbance and/or delinquency. Thepractice portrayed is not ‘model’ but illustrativeof the dilemmas of practitioners beginning to work with groupsof young people for the first time. The evidence of the studypoints to the difficulties that an over-simplified view of participationand democracy can create, and indicates the need for group workersto define their purpose and objectives and to establish a contractor working agreement with group members. In relation to thedebate about ‘talking’ and ‘doing’ inintermediate treatment, it is suggested that a model of groupwork practice that distinguishes between ‘activity asan end in itself’, ‘activity as a means to an end’,and ‘focussed discussion’ may be helpful to groupworkers in conceptualizing the totality of their task. Socialwork with groups is still more talked about than practised.This article describes the attempts of a newly established teamof intermediate treatment workers to practise group work withyoung adolescents whose behaviour and social circumstances wereregarded as problematic. As a part-time researcher attachedto the project team, the author had access through participantobservation to groups over a six-month period and he also hadthe opportunity of listening to group workers discussing theirwork at review meetings.     

Going missing from residential and foster care: linking biographies and contexts

Summary The findings discussed here derive from a Department of Healthfunded study into young people who go missing from foster andresidential placements. We found going missing to be a widespreadphenomenon especially, though not exclusively, in residentialcare. The risks encountered by young people included involvementin offending, substance misuse, rough sleeping and sexual exploitation,including prostitution. However, patterns of going missing werecomplex. Different patterns were identified for those who wentmissing to be with friends or family as compared to those whoran away, the latter group tending to place themselves at greaterrisk. Those who went missing repeatedly were at risk of increasingdetachment from substitute carers and school and were more likelyto have offended in the past. However, these longer-term risksdiffered significantly from those who had first gone missingfrom home when compared to those first missing from substitutecare. The complex motivations that prompt young people to gomissing are also discussed and the balance between individualand environmental factors in explaining this phenomenon is explored.     

The Role of Residential and Nursing Homes in the Last Year of People's Lives

Dr Ann Cartwright, Institute for Social Studies in Medical Care, 14 South Hill Park, London NW3 2SB. Summary Almost a quarter of a random sample of adults dying in 1987had spent at least part of the last year of their lives in aresidential or nursing home; one in eight spent all of thatyear in one. The old, the unmarried, those with difficulty lookingafter themselves, the confused, the incontinent, the blind,the deaf, and the bad tempered were more likely to be in suchhomes than others. With their greater dependency, people living in residentialhomes received rather more consultations and home visits—althoughnot night calls—from their general practitioners. Butthey did not get more help from community nurses and they wereless likely to be admitted to, or to die in, a hospital or hospice. According to the assesments of relatives, friends, and neighbourswho answered the questions, the quality of life of people whohad been in a residential home for a year or more before theirdeath was similar to that of others who died but had never beenin such a home. It was those who were admitted in the year beforethey died who were perceived as having a relatively poor qualityof life in that year. Increasingly, the quality of life duringthe year before death is going to depend on the attributes ofresidential homes and their staff.     

Help for Those Bereaved by Suicide

Summary Thirty-one people widowed by the suicide of a spouse were askedabout their needs following the bereavement. All had needs ofsome kind, most of them being met by relations. Nevertheless,more help could easily have been given by professional people.We make proposals here aimed at increasing the awareness ofthose who cope with the aftermath of suicide. They could domore to ease the burden for survivors.     

Tolerating Stress in Social Work Practice: The Example of a Burns Unit

Summary Social work in a burns unit exposes the practitioner to continuousand extreme stress, which arises both from the nature of thecaseload and from the nature of the setting. Burned patients,and the staff who care for them, tend to adapt in characteristicways to the suffering they encounter. The social worker, bygoing through a similar process of adaptation, can perhaps becomeable to offer sensitive help to patients without becoming overwhelmed.Stress can be contained more readily if informed personal supportis available to the worker; however, because of certain featuresof the setting, such support is not always easily obtained.     

Social Work as an Aspect of Primary Health Care: The Social Workers' View

Summary This study is based on an analysis of social workers' viewsof their work with 168 clients referred over a six month periodin 1977 in a health centre setting. A wide range of referralswas made and there was close collaboration with other primaryhealth care professionals as well as outside agencies. Far morepsycho-social problems were encountered by the social workersin the course of their intervention than were apparent on referral,although most of the work was short term. Social work with theindividual predominated and a variety of traditional socialwork skills were employed, although the elderly received relativelylittle help with emotional problems and were offered mainlypractical help. Social workers' perceptions of their clientsare discussed in relation to their choice of methods of interventionand feelings of efficacy. The attachment scheme emerges as generallyfruitful both in terms of social workers' job satisfaction andclients benefitting from a multi-disciplinary approach; howeverthe need for closer inter-professional collaboration in meetingthe needs of the elderly is highlighted.     

Towards Accountability in Social Work: Long Term Social Work in an Area Office

Summary This article reports the results of monitoring the social workof two long term teams in an area office throughout one yearwith the help of a computerized Case Review System. It describesthe characteristics of some 1,400 long-term cases of whom 61%were disabled, visually handicapped and/or elderly and 22% presentedproblems related to children and families. One of the outstanding features was the concentration on surveillanceand review visiting which was reported for nearly three quartersof these cases and was considered the most important socialworker activity in two fifths of them. In over half of theselong term situations no change was expected and nearly threequarters of the cases were to remain open indefinitely. Another striking feature was the somewhat uneven distributionof social work resources among the different problem groups.Although the physically disabled and/or elderly outnumberedthe child/family problems by two to one, they made up only 20%of the cases allocated to individual social workers, while almostall the child and family problems were allocated amounting to35% of all individual caseloads. But the disabled and elderlyreceived far more domiciliary services and aids to daily living. This exercise has brought into sharp focus the question of howto ensure continuous support and surveillance for the very frailelderly, as the occasional social work visit did not appearto be the appropriate means of support, rarely anticipatingor averting crises. The data highlight the challenge which chronically disorganizedand disturbed families present to social work skills. The outcomescast doubt on the wisdom of closing, within the intake stageas low priority, relatively early family problems, and on thesharp division into intake and long term teams. The general issue emerging is the need to formulate more precisesocial service strategies for those who require long term careby others to some extent—the very old and frail, the chronicallyphysically and mentally disabled and children in long term care—andwhat specific contributions social workers can usefully maketo this enterprise.     

The Client, The Caseworker and The Absent Third Person

Summary Some people seek social work help with problems that have arisenin their relationships with others to whom they are very closeand by whom they feel betrayed, attacked or maltreated. Often,so great are the distress and force with which the problem isbrought, the social worker may find himself drawn to acceptas substantially accurate the client's view of the situationand to act accordingly. This article argues that such a lineof action may be misguided or even harmful, and that help canonly be effective in the situations described if it has as oneof its basic assumptions the notion that the picture conveyedof 'the absent third person' has more connection with the client'sown inner needs than with anyone else     

A Reflection of The Rising Spectre of Conservatism: Motivational Accounts of Social Work Students

Summary It has recently been argued that the increasing conservatismof Western society is reflected in those entering social work.Pearson, however, has argued that social work recruits by theirchoice of occupation are politically deviant. In this papermotivational accounts of social work students and intendingpsychologists are examined in light of the emerging politicaltrends. Social work students were more concerned with personalgrowth, and later in training with effecting social change,than the intending psychologist. An examination of motivationalaccounts revealed two groups of social work students. The traditionalbase of the profession was represented by a subgroup who wishedto help others and/or effect social change. A second group ofstudents, concerned with the benefits that could accrue to selfthrough social work practice, was also identified. It is consideredthis privatization reflects the dominant ideological trend beinggiven personal meaning by the student.     

The Social Work Task in an Acute Psychiatric In-Patient Unit

Summary This paper reports the results of monitoring all admissionsfrom a prescribed geographical area to an acute psychiatricin-patient unit for a six month period. Members of the hospitalsocial work department assessed all admissions and selectedapproximately one-half of these for high social work input Demographicdata for the whole subject group is examined and compared tothe high input group. The case review system outlined by Goldbergand Fruin (1976) is used to describe the clients' social problemson admission, as well as the social work task, in terms of practicalservices and other social worker activities. These findingsare compared to those of Goldberg et al. (1977) who examinedthe social work task in an area office social services departmentintake team. Despite differences in demographic profiles ofthe two groups and consequently differing social problems, thesocial work task in both settings was found to be similar. Inboth studies 53% of clients were offered some practical (althoughdifferent service) and the most common social work activitieswere found to be assessment, information and advice, and mobilizingresources.     

Task-centred Casework with Marital Problems

Summary The use of task-centred casework with people who have maritalproblems and have taken an overdose is described. The stagesof task-centred work are illustrated and difficulties whichwere encountered are discussed. Task-centred casework is seento be a feasible and helpful method of working with people withmarital problems.