Strengths-Based Social Work Assessment: Transforming the Dominant Paradigm

Abstract

This is a review of some of the conflicts between traditional problem-based assessments and alternative, strengths-based approaches. It offers useful tools and strategies for incorporating client-centered, strengths-based practice in settings where social workers are required to use assessment processes based on the medical model and deficit-based language of psychopathology and the DSM. It also promotes a process of infiltrating, influencing, and transforming the of assessment process so that it reflects a more holistic and strengths-based social work perspective. Examples are provided for incorporating the strengths perspective in practice.

Protective Factors in Families: Themes From a Socioecological Study of Australian Defence Force Families Experiencing Parental Deployment

“…Concentrating on the negative is a legacy of the medical model that adheres to a deficit model of human behavior (Graybeal, 2001). It is an approach many professionals cling to because of their conventional instruction in this approach (Sims, 2002) and one that infiltrates policy makers.…”

Power, Pathological Worldviews, and the Strengths Perspective in Social Work

“…We also noted that the strengths perspective has been criticized for being naïve and for downplaying the barriers that individuals labeled with mental illnesses face (Brun & Rapp, 2001;Graybeal, 2001). We asserted that these criticisms are based on a dichotomous formulation of health and illness.…”

The ethics of predictive risk modelling in the Aotearoa/New Zealand child welfare context: Child abuse prevention or neo-liberal tool?

“…A 'risk paradigm' creates professionals as experts, with lay people considered biased, and untrustworthy processors of knowledge (Stalker, 2003). This decreases space for family-led, creative responses to difficulties, and can contribute to a deficit/problem orientation instead of the strengths/resilience/safety orientations currently considered best practice (Saleebey, 2006;Graybeal, 2001). …”