Posted: September 8th, 2022

Describe how a social worker would conceptualize a presenting 7

Describe how a social worker would conceptualize a presenting problem related to structural issues or barriers that contribute to a client’s marginalization using the two theories you selected.
Using the two theories you chose, explain how a social worker would think about a problem related to structural issues or barriers that cause a client to be on the outside.
After reading the assigned readings about theoretical approaches to Psychological Theories of Poverty, I chose theories that show both individual-related and structural/cultural-related theories that address conceptualized representations of foreseen structural issues and/or barriers that further contribute to society’s experienced marginalization. The first theory that shows how people relate to their environments is the ecological theory, which, from a sociological point of view, shows how social entities are connected to their environments. “Adaptation and selection” are two of the most important parts of the ecological theory. Adaptation is the process by which an organism changes in order to survive best in its environment. Selection is the process by which the least able to survive in a certain environment are weeded out (Aldric, 1979). The ecological theory basically says that people should pay attention to how people act in their social environment and how their actions show how resilient they are (Turner & Lehning, 2007). The second theory I chose to talk about is the naturalizing perspective theory combined with the cultural-relativistic perspective. This theory confirms that there are biological factors that may lead to poverty and also suggests that poorer communities have different cultural experiences than the rest of society. The culture of poverty theory looks at how social environments affect people who live in poverty. People who live in a culture of poverty are more likely to have family problems, rough emotions, and ongoing family, financial, and health problems (Turner & Lehning, 2007). This theory goes into more detail about the lack of or poor political, economic, and social freedom that people have. Both theories also let social workers dig deeper into problems that hurt communities that need help more than others. For example, they can find out if the targeted population isn’t getting enough resources or is being ignored. In that case, social workers can take it upon themselves to help clients and communities learn more about resources they could use, while still showing cultural humility and competence.
Explain how this way of thinking is different from a person-centered or structure/culture-centered theoretical lens.
The related theories can be complicated because of the way people think about the differences between them and between them and cultural/structural theories. Social dysfunctionality, especially between culture and race, is an obvious factor that lets social workers see this complexity through a social work lens (Glazer, 2000). An individualized lens looks at how a person’s environment, education, and underlying health conditions, such as mental illnesses, affect them as a cause of their poverty (Turner & Lehning, 2007). Also, the difference between the environment being the cause of poverty and underlying health or mental illnesses being the root cause of poverty is that one is related to the person and the other is related to the structure or culture.

Compare how the social worker would approach the client and the problem and how the social worker would step in based on the two different theoretical lenses.
I would choose to use skills like empathy, understanding, cultural humility, competency both culturally and in terms of knowledge, and empowerment to deal with poverty, which is the most common problem and/or barrier we know about from the theoretical lenses we are evaluating. By taking an empathetic approach, I’m able to build a stronger relationship with my ideal client or group of people. When using a personalized theory like the ecological theory to treat a client, I, as a practitioner, would look at the types of psychosocial interventions and medication management that help a client or targeted group feel more in control of their psychiatric and overall health. Compared to the structured theory I chose, like the culture of poverty theory, the way I would work as a social worker would be to use structured assessment tools like Sociograms, Ecomaps, Culturagrams, and other tools that help create systematic ways to help clients solve problems or work through issues. In addition, this structured tool gives practitioners a way to observe, evaluate, and record environmental conditions in a structured way.

References:
Organizations and Environments was written by Howard Aldrich in 1979. Prentice-Hall is in Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Glazer, N. (2000). Disaggregating Culture. In the books by L.E. Harrison and S.P. (Eds.). Culture is important (pp. 219-230).
Turner, K., & Lehning, A. J. (2007). Theories of poverty based on psychology. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 16(1–2), pp. 57–72. https://doi.org/10.1300/J137v16n01 05

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