Person & Environment
This social work concept asks us to understand a person in relation to the multiple environments and contexts surrounding them.
What is Person-in-Environment (PIE)?
“The parts of a person's environment are interconnected, and change in one part can affect the others.”
What is Systems Theory?
Housing, transportation, education, food access, working conditions, and access to health care can all fall under this broad concept.
What are Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)?
Race, gender, class, language, citizenship, ability, sexuality, and other dimensions help shape where a person is positioned within society. This is called their ______.
What is social location?
This perspective says family members are interconnected: change affecting one member can influence other members and the larger family.
What is the Family Systems Perspective?
This word means “relating to the physical body.”
What is somatic?
Freud's term for immediate wishes and impulses.
What is the id?
Piaget's term for an existing pattern used to interpret experience.
What is a schema?
Any event in which environmental or internal demands tax a person's adaptive resources.
What is stress?
A social worker meets individually with a college student to identify barriers affecting the student's academic success. This is primarily this level of system.
What is a micro system?
“To understand this situation, ask who has power, who controls resources, who benefits, and who experiences inequality.”
What is Conflict Theory?
One of these increases vulnerability and the other increases resources, capacity, or resilience.
What are risk factors and protective factors?
This concept recognizes that multiple dimensions of identity and social position interact rather than operating independently.
What is intersectionality?
This visual assessment maps family members and relationships across generations.
What is a Genogram?
The body gears up for action in response to what is happening around it.
What is mobilization or activation?
Freud's term for internalized rules and ideals.
What is the superego?
A new experience fits into an existing schema without requiring the schema itself to change.
What is assimilation?
A major upset in psychological equilibrium caused by harm, threat, or challenge that the person cannot currently cope with.
What is a crisis?
A social worker coordinates a partnership between a school, behavioral health agency, and youth organization. This is primarily this level.
What is a mezzo system?
A worker asks how rewards, costs, available resources, and alternatives influence the choices people make.
What is Exchange and Choice Theory?
A community expands affordable housing and reliable transportation rather than waiting until families experience homelessness or health crises. This is primarily what kind of approach?
What is an upstream approach?
This framework asks us to understand a person's unique way of seeing themselves and the world as shaped by individual, family, cultural, community, societal, and environmental influences.
What is Individualized Worldview?
This visual assessment focuses on the connections between a family and the larger systems surrounding it.
What is an Ecomap?
After the need for activation passes, the body comes down from that activation. According to Resmaa Menakem this process is called ______.
What is settling?
After receiving frightening news at work, Malik says nothing to his supervisor but goes home and angrily yells at his brother. Which defense mechanism is illustrated?
What is displacement?
Adolescents asking “Who am I, and where do I belong?” are navigating this Eriksonian psychosocial tension.
What is identity vs. role confusion?
Prolonged activation of the stress-response system without adequate supportive adaptive coping.
What is toxic stress?
Advocates seek statewide changes to housing policy because existing rules are contributing to housing instability. This level of intervention is being targeted.
What is the macro system?
*DAILY DOUBLE: Two people engage in the same behavior. One explanation focuses on how society created the meanings attached to that behavior. Another focuses on unconscious internal conflicts and earlier relational experiences. Name both theories.
What are Social Constructionist Theory and Psychodynamic Theory?
One program attempts to reduce risks before a serious problem develops. Another responds after the problem is already present. Name the two approaches.
What are prevention and intervention?
This perspective asks us to understand experience from the person's own subjective point of view rather than assuming an outside observer's interpretation is sufficient.
What is the Phenomenological Perspective?
A social worker wants to understand when a divorce, relocation, job loss, birth, and death occurred and how these events relate to one another across time. Which tool fits BEST?
What is a Family Timeline?
Tone, posture, movement, facial expression, and proximity illustrate the Resmaa Menakem idea that the body does these two things in relationships.
What are broadcasts and receives?
Sofia is worried that others will judge her, but instead insists that everyone else is judgmental and dislikes her. Which defense mechanism BEST fits?
What is projection?
A child watches another child receive praise for helping clean up. Later, the observing child begins helping too. Which theorist's approach BEST explains learning through observation and imitation?
What is Social Learning Theory/modeling.
After perceiving danger, a person becomes very still, feels unable to move, and stops responding. Which common stress response is MOST consistent with this description?
What is freeze?
Jordan's anxiety is influenced by financial pressure, family relationships, experiences at school, neighborhood conditions, identity, and physical health. Name the course concept that BEST explains why looking for a single cause would be inadequate.
What is the need for a multidimensional approach?
A child begins putting away their toys more consistently because praise follows the behavior.
What is Behavioral Theory?
This class analogy asks us to consider why we keep rescuing people after they fall instead of moving resources toward preventing people from reaching the edge in the first place.
What is the Cliff of Good Health analogy?
Two employees experience the same workplace policy very differently because their social positions give them different access to resources, credibility, and decision-making power. Name two course concepts that could help analyze these differences.
What are social location, standpoint theory, power, privilege, oppression, marginalization, or intersectionality?
A child expects a caregiver to respond when distressed and comfortably seeks closeness and support. Which relational pattern is MOST consistent with this description?
What is secure attachment?
*DAILY DOUBLE* One response involves moving through difficult experiences with honesty, accountability, vulnerability, and capacity for growth. Another moves around difficulty through patterns such as avoidance, blame, denial, or control. Name both.
What are clean pain and dirty pain?
A person receives frightening medical news but speaks only about research statistics and technical details while avoiding discussion of their fear. Which defense mechanism BEST fits?
What is intellectualization?
*DAILY DOUBLE* One theorist says ability can be expressed in several distinguishable forms. Another studies the reasoning people use to justify whether something is right or wrong. Name both theorists and theories.
Who are Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Reasoning?
One concept describes what people do to manage stressful situations and their effects. The other describes the adjustments that occur in biological responses, perceptions, or lifestyle. Name both.
What are coping and adaptation?