Group Work with Families

Family practice is a special case of social work with groups. This practice especially requires an ethnic and multicultural perspective. Such a framework is presented in this paper with focus on group work with families in Singapore. Singapore is an economically developed East Asian nation populated predominately by three ethnic groups: Chinese, Malay, and Indian. These groups have experienced a wider culture in transition, affecting their family group culture. Through use of the sensitizing conceptual frameworks of family cultural reality and value orientation theory, this paper presents a multicultural perspective and applies it to group work with families in Singapore. The framework used is deemed applicable to practice with the family and other small groups in similar multicultural contexts wherein members experience the effects of swift social change.