The peculiarities of social worker’s work with ethnically mixed families

Abstract

The article deals with theoretical analysis of the essence of the concept “ethnically mixed families”. It has been defined that such family is a special family type, because the spouses are representatives of different ethnic groups in it. On the one hand, interethnic marriages are the result of interethnic interaction, and on the other hand, these marriages have a great influence on the ethno-cultural characteristics of interacting ethnicities. It is also necessary to study the influence of the psychological factor; therefore, not only representatives of certain ethnic groups, but personalities with a set of their individual qualities are getting married. The article gives a detailed analysis of the main characteristics of ethnically mixed families and contains the data that such families are existed on the so-called crossroads of cultures. Such interaction can lead to the complete oppression of one of them, to the assimilation of one of the contacting cultures, or vice versa – to parallel existence, to the maintenance and continuation of the cultural peculiarities of both ethnic groups. Social counseling is exposed as a method of working a social worker with ethnically mixed families. The following family counseling methods have been specified: regulation, standardization, instruction, example, imitation, encouragement, persuasion, criticism, informing, watching and analyzing of video and audio recordings, creative works, situations; expert assessments; role-play game; writing a script for solving the family problem. It has been investigated that the main purpose of social counseling is to assist the client in solving his social problems and in establishing interpersonal relationships with others. Keywords: family, ethnically mixed family, social worker, social work, social counseling.