SW Definitions
A profession dedicated to enhancing human well-being and helping meet the basic needs of all people—especially those who are vulnerable, oppressed, or living in poverty.
What is Social Work
This perspective challenges deficit-based practice by focusing on client abilities, resources, and resilience rather than problems.
What is the Strengths Perspective?
Called the ‘mother of social work,’ she co-founded Hull House and advocated for immigrants, labor rights, and social reform
Who is Jane Addams?
This professional code outlines six core values, including service, social justice, and integrity.
What is the NASW Code of Ethics?
This term describes the ability to understand, respect, and respond effectively to the cultural needs of clients.
What is cultural competence?
The set of organizations, programs, agencies, and other institutions that help people meet their educational, financial, social, and health needs.
What is a social welfare system?
This perspective explains behavior by looking at the fit between individuals and their social and physical environments.
What is the Person in the Environment Perspective
This pivotal legislation established unemployment insurance, old-age benefits, and laid the groundwork for modern social welfare.
What is the Social Security Act of 1935?
This core social work value emphasizes helping people in need and addressing social problems above self-interest.
What is service?
This core competency involves active listening, clear verbal and written communication, and adapting style to client needs.
What is effective communication?
Factors and/or characteristics that increase the likelihood that someone will experience poverty, discrimination, and marginalization.
What is Instersectionality?
This perspective uses layers like micro, meso, exo, and macro systems to explain how environments shape human development.
What is the Ecosystems Perspective?
Founded in the late 1800s, this movement emphasized ‘scientific charity’ and used friendly visitors to assess and support poor families.
What is the Charity Organization Society Movement?
This value guides social workers to challenge oppression and promote equal access to resources.
What is social justice?
This component of cultural competence involves learning about clients’ cultural backgrounds, histories, and worldviews.
What is cultural knowledge?
Individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities
What is a client system?
This perspective focuses on increasing personal, interpersonal, and political power so clients can improve their life circumstances.
Empowerment Perspective
This early social work leader wrote Social Diagnosis and helped formalize casework as a professional practice.
Who is Mary Richmond?
This core value emphasizes that relationships are central vehicles for change in social work practice.
What is the importance of human relationships?
Cultural humility emphasizes that competence is never fully achieved and instead requires this ongoing process of reflection and learning.
What is lifelong learning?
This lifelong practice emphasizes openness, self-reflection, and learning from clients about their cultural experiences.
What is cultural humility?
This theory views individuals, families, and communities as interrelated parts of a whole, where change in one part affects all others.
What is Systems Theory?
This reformer advocated for humane treatment of people with mental illness and helped establish state psychiatric hospitals.
Who is Dorthea Dix?
This value requires social workers to treat each client with respect and support their right to self-determination.
What is the dignity and worth of the person?
What approach trains social work students to intervene with clients at multiple levels within a system?
What is a generalist approach?