Strengths Based Social Work Practice

By Helen Kelly, Medical Social Worker & Graduate of the Masters in Social Work, NUI Galway 2020

Strengths-based practice in social work views clients as both resilient and resourceful in times of crisis. The fundamental tenet of a strengths-based approach focuses on the social worker’s collaborative relationship with the client, based on the assumption that people are best positioned to solve their own problems. Prior to the arrival of strengths-based approaches, the central ideology centred on an “expert” practitioner making a diagnosis on a client and drawing up a treatment plan to fit with this diagnosis. People were thus viewed mainly in terms of their pathologies and problems. In a strengths-based model, the professional works alongside the client to identify the client’s capacities to overcome their issues and thus improve their quality of life. Therefore, strengths-based approaches serve to empower the vulnerable people to which the field of social work traditionally has been devoted to.

Turnell & Edwards(1999:47) state that “Over the last decade, a number of strengths-based solution-focused approaches have been developed for child protection settings. These emphasise the relationship between child protection workers and their clients as ‘the principle vehicle for change” However, these relationships are multifaceted, requiring social workers to vigorously pursue the clients’ viewpoints, strategies and goals while fulfilling their authorised authority when collaborative solutions fall short of ensuring child safety.  According to Saleebey (1992:171) “The strengths perspectives obligates workers to understand that, however downtrodden or sick, individuals have survived (and in some cases even thrived). They have taken steps, summoned up resources, and coped. We need to know what they have done, how they have done it, what they have learned from doing it, and what resources (inner and outer) were available in their struggle to surmount their troubles.”

Thus, the very core of a strengths-based approach necessitates that social workers view their clients by the skills they possess, not by their pathologies or their deficits. Planned assessments and interventions based on a pathologizing approach to personhood are more probable to preserve the pathology rather than modifying it. (Goldstein, 1990). When utilising a strengths-based approach, the social worker must firstly “begin where the client is at.” This moves the focus away from the client’s problems and centres more on how the client is dealing with these problems. Nonetheless, working with clients consistent with the ideologies of the strength’s perspective does not seek to deny the very existence of their problems or indeed encouraging them to abandon their authentic feelings of distress and despair. Quade and Ehrenreich (1997) seek to pose the question of the appropriate time to address strengths. They outline that clients may typically present to the social worker with a “vulnerability perspective,” necessitating the social worker to identify with the client’s pain and try to ease the burden through sharing. Identifying of the client’s strengths are unlikely to be pertinent to the them during the initial sessions, and a hasty approach to their strengths may be interpreted by the client as lack of understanding or rejection by the social worker.

Strengths-based practice is now generally seen as a perspective requiring confidence in client capacity and a promise to recognise and build upon the client strengths (Saleebey, 2012; Staudt, Howard, & Drake, 2001). The development of several models of practice followed, with solution-focused therapy being identified as the most suitable for use in a child protection setting. Solution-focused therapy was created in the United States and it was the culmination of efforts to create a model of brief therapeutic treatment that would prove to be more effective than conventional forms of treatment. (de Shazer, 1982; de Shazer et al., 1986). The solution-focused therapist seeks to challenge the client’s belief of their problems as being continuous, with taken for granted patterns of behaviour presenting as a client choice. The therapist then works with the client’s perception of their reality to uphold client self-determination and align the proposed intervention to the client’s thinking and behaving, while presenting appropriate “news of a difference” (de Shazer, 1982) to promote a change in cognitive responses. The most fundamental feature of solution-focused therapy consisted of a re focusing from challenging behaviours to solutions. Clients were assumed to be active in resolving their challenges, and the therapist would work closely with the client in helping them to find the most effective solutions. By using techniques such the miracle question (De Jong & Miller, 1995), the therapist prompted an account of client goals and successes and focused on the accounts of strengths and success.

In conclusion, the role of the social worker using a strengths-based approach turns into less of a perceived ‘fixer’ of problems and more about being a facilitator of solutions. Observing social work practitioners learn together with clients and reflecting on practice can have a positive and enduring effect on future development of services. (O’Neil, 2003). A social worker who operates from a strengths-based perspective will unsurprisingly focus on the things that are working well in a client’s life to produce positive experiences driven by the client’s fundamental goals and ambitions. Therefore, a strengths-based approach is not merely about methods that are used with client’s engaged in services; it is about diverse concepts and relationships that embody our support services.