Inside Family Therapy:
A Case Study in Family Healing
Learning Objectives
Upon completing the course you'll be able to:
Describe the three problems that can make a case difficult and cite specific examples of each problem.
Describe the goal of sorting out reasons for acting and
identify the two factors that can complicate achieving the goal.
Identify and describe the six kinds of reasons that can generally be provided for our acts and omissions.
Identify and
describe the four steps involved in systematically determining the method of doing what is ethical.
Summarize three
ethical theories.
List the five distinguishing features of utilitarianism,
deontology and virtue theories.
Discuss the relationship between intervention and
self-determination.
Identify the two conditions that must be satisfied if someone is to be autonomous.
Outline the
problems with the criterion of competence, appropriately informed and voluntarily deciding.
Give an example of choosing between competing harms.
Discuss
conflicts with self-determination as a right and reasons for this right to be denied.
Discuss the
various types of possible relations with clients and identify the harms that can potentially occur in each relationship.
Describe the various obligations a social worker has to serve a client competently.
Discuss the obligations social workers have to their clients.
Summarize the concept of drawing boundaries.
Describe the virtues that social work practitioners should
display with clients and colleagues.
Discuss the special problems that arise when a social work
practitioner thinks a client is making a mistake and refuses to follow the practitioner's recommendations.
Outline the problems that can arise in identifying who the client is in the therapeutic relationship with a social worker practitioner.
Identify the various factors that can contribute to
conflicts among social workers resulting in the potential for ethical problems.
Outline the competencies required to assess the competence
of another social worker.
Discuss the five steps that can lead to successful communication when communication has previously failed between colleagues.
Describe the four possible outcomes when talking through a conflict does not result in complete agreement.
Discuss the two sorts of problems that can arise when the
concerns of professionals in different fields overlap.
Describe the challenges that arise when professionals work
together as peers and when professionals supervise one another.
Discuss the various internal and external ethical conflicts that may arise for social work practitioners and identify the key professional
character traits discussed in the text.
Describe the importance of professional discretion and clarity around agency goals.
Differentiate between the potential ethical conflicts that
may arise between agencies that are in competition versus those whom are engaged in cooperative endeavors.
Discuss the concept of Particular Justice and give a case example illustrating this concept.
Summarize the
Formal Principle of Justice and give relevant examples
Summarize the Substantive Principles of Justice and state the series of three questions that must be asked and answered to
force out the basis a person has for distinguishing people in terms of distributions and surfacing the substantive principle of justice being assumed so that it can be
assessed.
Differentiate between Perfect procedural justice and Imperfect procedural justice.
Describe the role of a social work practitioner in terms of their obligation to work for social justice.
Summarize the concept of conditions of justice.
Outline the concept of justice as a free transaction and describe the implications for social work practice.
Outline the concept of justice as fairness and describe the implications for social work practice.
Discuss
alternative theories of justice and their impacts on social work practice.
Evaluation of Individual Objectives
To assess the effectiveness of the course material, we ask that you evaluate your achievement of each learning objective on a scale of A to D (A=excellent, B=good, C=fair, D=unsatisfactory). Please indicate your responses next to each learning objective and return it to us with your completed exam.Chapter 1: Ethics in
Social Work: Tracking Harms
Two types of harms
Extrinsic harms - effects of the act in question
Intrinsic harms - a harm produced by the act itself
Resolution requires making a judgment between alternatives
Facts are problematic
Critical information may be missing or not accessible
Case is conceptually problematic
What actions or interventions would be responsible and ethical given the present
circumstances of the case
Try to understand why the participants are doing what they are doing by constructing
arguments that would justify their acts or omissions
Determine what goals the participants had and what means they thought would achieve those goals; then determine what goals ought to be achieved and determine what means are best for achieving those goals.
Back off from the case and judge what is best to do.
What will minimize harms?
Determine how to do what ought to be done in a way that will itself produce more
good than harm.
The goal of sorting out reasons for acting is to put us in a position to distinguish the sorts of reasons individuals have in particular cases.
It is difficult to be sure we know people's reasons for acting.
It is even harder to be sure we have gotten things right when we are ourselves
parties to a case.
Self-Interest and self-sacrifice
Acting out of prudence
Doing what is legally permitted or required
Doing what is normally done
Appealing to the code of ethics
Doing what is ethical
Getting the facts
Discounting our biases
Giving reasons
Finding true ethical premises
Utilitarianism
Deontology
Virtue theories
Competing visions of the kind of world we ought to live in
Based on different natural features we have
Picking out different facts in a situation as being ethically relevant and
important
Giving different sets of individuals ethical standing, excluding some kinds of beings from having a say in how they are treated ethically and including others
Intervention and self-determination
Who are the participants?
Why are they doing what they are doing?
Are the reasons that seem most plausible to attribute to them sufficient to justify
what they are doing?
The situation is one in which there are real options.
The person is mentally competent, informed and deciding voluntarily.
We are often unable to find out enough about a person to make an assessment of his
or her competence.
We can find ourselves unclear about what we would be willing to count as
appropriately informed or properly voluntary.
We may be plagued with conceptual
unclarity.
If a person's decision does not seem right for a situation, we question our
presumption about self-determination.
We hunt for evidences of lack of information, incompetence or less than voluntary
choice so we can understand why a person makes a particular decision.
When the case is factually problematic, we seek interventions that respect the
person involved.
Self-determination is not an absolute value.
Self-determination is a prima facie right that can be denied only for
ethical reasons more weighty than the reasons for preserving this right.
Relations with clients
Dual relationships
Conflicts of interest
A professional has an obligation to ensure that a client is competently served.
A social worker has the minimal professional obligation to help and to promote the
client's well-being.
Professionals have a special obligation not to put themselves in situations in
which there are potential conflicts of interest.
To help and promote the client's well-being
To tell the truth
To treat clients fairly
To encourage self-determination
To encourage autonomy
There is reciprocity in every relationship.
Drawing boundaries can be difficult.
Fair
Honest
Dependable
Competent
Trustworthy
Attentive
Listen carefully
Keep confidences
Follow-through on commitments
Establish clear boundaries
What are the social worker's current goals and what should they be?
Carefully weigh the alternative courses of action
When treating a family in which the family members have competing interests, each
member should have a different social worker.
If social workers have families as their clients, it is either because the families
can be kept intact with minimal resources or because short-term intervention, even with intensive resources, is likely to solve the problem.
Current policies can complicate making ethical choices for each individual family
member when a choice must be made between trying to hold a family together without adequate resources or pulling it apart by putting the children in foster care.
Difficulties among colleagues
Differences in status, gender, experience and educational background can impact how
one is perceived by others in the profession and these different perceptions can create ethical problems.
Questioning a colleague's reasoning about a wide variety of judgments can put his or her professional competence in
doubt.
An
understanding of the various ways in which to practice a profession
An ability to back off from your own
preferred method of practice to assess another method of practice that may not mesh at all well with yours
A
capacity to withhold judgment while you listen to all those involved, aiming for a full hearing of a case's ins and outs.
Gather evidence of the supposed pattern of misconduct and document it.
When you have a written statement, talk with the accused person.
When the accused person is willing, try to help by changing the underlying
conditions producing the problem.
Where possible, provide an alternative that also solves the original problem.
If a person must be fired, try to find another option if possible.
Less than the ideal
We may find a disparity regarding goals.
We may agree about our goals, but disagree about how best to achieve them.
Even when we agree on common goals and the means to achieve them, we may find
ourselves unable to work well with a colleague.
We find ourselves at odds with colleagues even though we agree on our common goals,
the means to achieve them, and we respect our colleagues and can talk well together. Someone else may have created a situation
that puts us at odds with our colleagues in a way that we cannot repair, even with the best of intentions and relationships.
Sometimes when professional concerns overlap nothing about the situation requires
that the one professional communicate with the other.
Sometimes competencies overlap and different sorts of professionals working
together on a case do not work together for their single client's best interests.
Maintaining Autonomy
Professional Autonomy
-
Any professional working with other professionals must sometimes face the
problem of compromising his or her autonomy, or self-determination.
-
This difficulty arises more acutely when the professional is ordered to do
something by a supervisor that is directly contrary to what would be done if the professional were acting independently.
-
What it seems someone ought to do as the director of an agency may conflict
with what he or she ought to do as a social work practitioner.
-
It is important to determine both short-term and long-term goals and to
assess the harms of various courses of action before taking action.
Integrity and Agency Policies
Internal Ethical Problems
External Ethical Problems
Having an Ethical Character
Professional Character Traits
Agency Goals
Discretion and Benign Neglect
Clarity of Goals and Professional Discretion
Lack of Clarity about Goals
Agencies in Competition
Back
To The Top