SH1658

Scope of Social Work

A. Social Work as a Primary Discipline

a. Adoption and services to unmarried parents – facilitating the difficult decision of unmarried
parents whether to keep the baby or place the child for adoption.
b. Foster care – removing the children from their homes and placing them temporarily in foster care.
c. Residential care – a group of care home or a residential treatment center for children exhibiting
antisocial behaviors or behaviors that require intensive treatment
d. Support in your own home – involves providing support services in order to keep children in their
own homes.
e. Protective services – protecting the child from child abuse, maltreatment, and exploitation by one
or both parents.
B. Family Services
a. Family Counseling
• Family casework – involves helping individual members of the family modify their behavior to
make them more effective contributors to the family
• Family Group Work – the process by which the family examine its relationship and resolves
their problem with the help of the social worker
• Family Therapy – focuses on transforming the structure of the family to make it more
supportive of its members.
b. Family life education – an intervention to strengthen the family through educational activities that
seek to prevent family breakdown
c. Family Planning – refers to assisting the families to plan the number, spacing, and timing of the
births of children to fit with their needs.
C. Income Maintenance
a. Public Assistance – refers to the provision of financial aid to the poor
b. Social Insurances – social provisions that are funded by employers and employees through
contributions to a specific program
c. Cash in kind and emergency support funds
D. Community Services
a. Community organization activities – involve the gathering and analysis of data related to the
delivery of services, matching that information with the data od population distribution
b. Community planning – refers to the involvement of social workers with the physical, economic,
and health planners in the long-range planning of communities.
c. Community development – the participation of social workers in providing to the people in the
communities as the aim to enhance their conditions

Interventive Roles and Functions of Social Workers

a. Resource broker – the role is about the direct provision of material aid and other resources that will
be helpful in reducing situational deficiencies.
b. Social broker – the role involves a process of negotiating the service jungle for clients. The social
worker links the client to the needed services and ensures quick delivery of these services.
c. Mediator – role includes acting as an intermediary or conciliator between persons or in groups and
the social worker engages her/his efforts to resolve disputes between the client and other parties.
d. Advocate – the role involves taking a partisan interest in the client and her/his cause and aims to
influence another party in the interest of the client through arguing, bargaining, negotiating, and
manipulating the environment on behalf of the client
e. Enabler – the role is about activities that the social worker engages in order to help the clients cope
with the current situation and eventually find strengths and resources within themselves to solve
problems they encountered,
f. Counselor/Therapist – role intends to restore, maintain, or enhance the client’s capacity to adapt to
her/his current reality

Ethical Considerations in the Client-Worker Relationship

a. Acceptance – the worker’s recognition of the individual’s worth as a human being imbued with
inherent worth and dignity

04 Handout 4 *Property of STI

Page 1 of 2
 SH1658

b. Nonjudgmental attitude – means without labeling, no stereotyping, and non-condemnatory act that
refrains from assigning blame, guilt, or failure to the client
c. Individualization – characterized that every individual is unique and possesses certain traits or
attributes specific only to her/himself.
d. Purposeful expression of feelings – refers to the worker’s allowing and facilitating the client’s
purposeful expression of feelings. This means free sharing with a sympathetic worker of his/her
thoughts and feelings even the negative ones.
e. Controlled emotional involvement – refers to the worker’s way out of responding to the client’s
purposeful expression of feelings. The worker must keep his/her own emotions under control and
should empathize but not over-identify with the client as the latter would
f. Confidentiality – refers to the preservation of secret information concerning the client which is
disclosed in the professional relationship.
g. Self-determination – is a derivative of the belief and dignity of a person – that he/she is endowed with
reason and free will and is capable of making his/her own choices.

Reference:
Melegrito, M., Dela Cruz, A., Valdez, V., & Fernandez, C. (2016). The Padayon Series: Disciplines and
Ideas in the Applied Social Sciences. Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing House, Inc.

04 Handout 4 *Property of STI

Page 2 of 2