The Planned Change Process
This foundation step continues throughout the planned change process; it involves building trust, rapport, clarifying the social worker’s role, and providing client opportunities for informed consent.
What is engagement?
This level of the ecological system includes family, peers, and school: systems an individual interacts with directly.
What is a microsystem
This principle asserts that clients have the right to define their own goals, make informed choices, and lead decision-making processes in partnership with the social worker.
What is self-determination?
This involves recognizing that trauma is common and practicing in ways that promote safety and choice, regardless if someone discloses experiences with trauma.
What is trauma awareness?
This practice supports transparency and client empowerment at the start of the helping relationship: being clear about what to expect, explaining people’s rights, limits of confidentiality, and respecting when a client says no.
What is informed consent?
The notion that effective direct practice requires drawing on multiple theories, methods, and knowledges to respond to clients' unique needs and contexts.
What is eclecticism?
This term describes how well an individual’s needs and capacities align with what their environment provides.
What is goodness of fit?
The capacity to navigate, resist, and transform adversity; that goes beyond an individual trait and is shaped by relationships, community, and structures.
What is resilience?
This means avoiding practices that could repeat or mirror past harms, especially those involving power, control, or lack of safety.
What is resisting retraumatization?
Advanced by Black feminist activists in the 1990s, this framework links people’s right to have (or not have) children, and to parent in safe, supported environments with social and economic justice.
What is reproductive justice?
Informed by the work of scholars like Moreau and Mullaly, this approach to micro practice involves working with individuals to meet their immediate needs (like housing, income, and safety) while also naming and challenging the structural injustices that created those needs.
What is structural social work?
Social work scholars Carel Germain and Alex Gitterman collaborated to develop the 'Life Model', which emphasized social work interventions focused on what instead of individuals adapting?
What is enhancing environments to meet the needs of individuals/communities?
Untapped capacities, assets, relationships, and more that people and their communities have, which can be uncovered and mobilized toward enacting change.
What are resources?
This perspective helps workers view presenting concerns not as pathology, but as survival responses developed to protect oneself in unsafe or uncontrollable environments.
What is understanding trauma responses as adaptive?
This practice involves examining and being accountable to how the social worker’s own experiences, power, and social location can shape their interpretations, decisions, and relationships with service users.
What is reflexivity?
This challenge can occur when social workers collect new information that contradicts their initial thinking, but does not adapt their plan or documentation accordingly.
What is confirmation bias?
This principle of systems theory recognizes that the same starting point can lead to different outcomes.
What is multifinality?
This orientation is essential to engagement in strengths-based practice; it reflects the worker’s belief in the client’s capacity for growth and their preferred future/goals.
What is hope?
This principle of trauma-informed care emphasizes that trauma is not only individual, but also shaped by structural forces including colonialism, racism, and sexism.
What are cultural, historical, and gender issues/influences?
This concept emphasizes how structures like racism, ableism, and classism intersect to shape people’s lived experiences through power, access, and social relationships. It helps social workers understand how oppression operates both personally and politically.
What is intersectionality?
Reasons why a social worker would use a visual tool, such as an ecomap or culturagram, during assessment
What are....
- supporting co-creating meaning with service users
- assisting in revealing patterns or connections that may be obscured in written narratives
- offering a visual map of relationships, resources, values, structural influences/barriers
This concept describes how a person and their environment continuously affect each other.
What are transactions?
Two problems with seeing people through a binary of either struggling or thriving?
What are oversimplifying the complexity of people’s lives; obscuring impacts of structures like racism and poverty; missing how people can experience pain and strength at the same time.
Three barriers at the level of agencies/organizations to implementing trauma-informed care
What are staff burnout, lack of training or supervision, pressure to prioritize productivity over relational work, ethical constraints leading to moral distress?
These include seeking to understand how systems of oppression including patriarchy may have shaped a person’s struggles, inquiring about survival strategies as forms of resistance, and asking about internalized societal messages
What are areas of inquiry/assessment priorities in feminist practice?