Theories & Development
The stage in Erik Erikson’s theory where adolescents explore their sense of self and personal identity.
What is Identity vs. Role Confusion?
This ethical principle emphasizes the client’s right to make their own choices and decisions.
What is Self-Determination?
A structured conversation used to gather detailed information about a client’s current functioning and background.
What is a Biopsychosocial Assessment?
This evidence-based approach focuses on changing distorted thinking patterns to influence behavior.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
The group is in an experiment that does not receive the treatment.
What is the control group?
This cognitive theorist believed that children actively construct knowledge through interaction with their environment, progressing through four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Who is Jean Piaget?
When a social worker finds out a client plans to harm someone, this legal and ethical duty may override confidentiality.
What is Duty to Warn / Duty to Protect?
This diagnosis requires both obsessions and compulsions that cause distress or impairment.
What is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)?
When a client is in crisis, the FIRST step is to ensure…
What is safety and stabilization?
The extent to which a test measures what it intends to measure.
What is validity?
This is Lev Vygotsky's term for the difference between what a learner can do without help and what they can achieve with guidance from a skilled partner.
What is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)?
This is the first step when a social worker’s personal values conflict with those of a client.
What is to seek supervision or consultation?
This is the process of systematically ruling out medical, substance-related, and situational causes before determining a psychological diagnosis, ensuring accuracy in identifying the primary disorder.
What is diagnostic differential ruling (or ruling out differential diagnoses)?
In motivational interviewing, this technique encourages clients to express reasons for change.
What is eliciting change talk?
A study design where neither the participants nor researchers know who receives treatment.
What is a double-blind study?
This theory explains how infants form emotional bonds with caregivers and identifies attachment styles such as secure, avoidant, and ambivalent, often demonstrated in the “Strange Situation.”
What is Attachment Theory?
A dual relationship occurs when…
What is a social worker has multiple roles or relationships with a client that may impair objectivity or cause harm?
Symptoms lasting 2+ years, characterized by low mood most days, describe this depressive disorder.
What is Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia)?
A social worker helping a client gain access to community resources is performing this function.
What is case management?
The process of collecting client outcome data to determine whether an intervention is effective.
What is program evaluation or outcome evaluation?
The stage in Kohlberg’s moral reasoning where individuals follow societal rules to maintain order and gain approval.
What is the Conventional Level?
When cultural beliefs and ethics conflict, the social worker should prioritize…
What is client safety and professional ethical standards?
A longitudinal design tracks participants over time to study this type of development.
What is developmental or lifespan change?
This brief, goal-oriented therapy focuses on clients’ strengths and the present rather than the past.
What is Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)?
This statistical measure describes how spread out scores are from the mean.
What is the standard deviation?