These roles are critical to effective social work practice. These core roles help the practitioner work effectively at various levels, including the individual, family, group, organization, and community. A social worker is expected to be knowledgeable and skilled in a variety of roles.
Role of Social Worker
The specific role of social worker that is chosen should ideally be based on what will be most impactful, considering the circumstances. This article identifies some, but certainly not all, of the roles assumed by social workers. The professional roles are as follows:
Activist
An activist seeks institutional change; often, the objective involves a shift in power and resources to a disadvantaged group. Activists are concerned about social injustice, inequality, and deprivation, and their strategies include conflict, confrontation, and negotiation.
The goal is to change the social environment to better meet the recognized needs of individuals. Using assertive and action-oriented methods for example, organizing concerned citizens to work toward improvements in services in a community for people with AIDS.
It is fundamental role of social workers that engage them in fact-finding, analysis of community needs, research, the dissemination and interpretation of information, mobilization, and other efforts to promote public understanding and support on behalf of existing or proposed social programs. Social action activity can be geared toward a problem that is local, statewide, or national in scope.
Advocate
This role of social worker involves the practitioner securing services or resources when they are inadequate or nonexistent. The role of advocate has been borrowed from the legal profession. It is an active, directive role in which the social worker advocates for a client or for a citizens’ group.
When a client or a citizens’ group is in need of help and existing institutions are uninterested (or even openly negative and hostile) in providing services, then the advocate’s role may be appropriate. In such a role, the advocate provides leadership for collecting information, arguing the correctness of the client’s need and request, and challenging the institution’s decision not to provide services.
The objective is not to ridicule or censure a particular institution but to modify or change one or more of its service policies. In this role, the advocate is a partisan (one-sided) who is exclusively serving the interests of a client or a citizens’ group. In being an advocate, a worker is seeking to empower a client or a citizen’s group by securing a beneficial change in one or more institutional policies (Zestrow, 2004).
Broker
This is a traditional role of social worker that involves the practitioner linking the consumer with social supports and services. Nowadays, even moderate-sized communities have 200 or 300 social service agencies/organizations providing community services.
Even human services professionals may be only partially aware of the total service network in their community. A broker links individuals and groups who need help with community services. For instance, a wife who experiences frequent physical abuse from her husband may be referred to a shelter home that provides support for women (Zestrow, 2004).
Conferee
It is derived from the idea of the conference, which involves the practitioner taking direct action to help clients solve problems (Pardeck et al., 1996). The role of social worker is to intervene in situations to protect individuals and communities and to meet the immediate needs of individuals and groups through material services such as food, shelter, health, etc.
Coordinator
Coordinators bring components together in some kind of organized manner. For example, for a multi-problem family, it is often necessary for several agencies to work together to meet the complicated financial, emotional, legal, health, social, educational, recreational, and interactional needs of the family members.
Someone at an agency needs to assume the role of case manager to coordinate the services from the different agencies to avoid duplication and to prevent the diverse services from having conflicting objectives.
Educator
The role of social worker involves giving information to clients and teaching them adaptive skills. To be an effective educator, the worker must first be knowledgeable. In addition, effective communication is crucial to ensure that information is conveyed clearly and easily understood by the recipient. Examples include teaching parenting skills to young parents, providing job-hunting strategies to the unemployed, and teaching anger-control techniques to individuals with bad tempers.
Empowerer
A key goal of social work practice is empowerment, which is the process of helping individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities increase their personal, interpersonal, socioeconomic, and political strength and influence by improving their circumstances.
Practitioners in the field of social work who adopt an empowerment-focused approach strive to help clients enhance their understanding of their surroundings, make informed decisions, take responsibility of those decisions, and exert influence over their life circumstances through organization and advocacy.
Empowerment-focused individuals in the field of social work aim to promote a fairer distribution of resources and power across various societal groups. This focus on equity and social justice has been a hallmark of the social work profession, as evidenced through the early settlement workers such as Jane Addams.
Enabler
This role of social worker focuses on actions taken when the practitioner structures, arranges and changes events, interactions, and environmental factors to facilitate and enhance system functioning. In simple terms, a worker helps individuals or groups to articulate their needs, clarify and identify their problems, explore resolution strategies, select and apply a strategy, and develop their capacities to deal with their own problems more effectively.
This is perhaps the most frequently used approach in counseling individuals, groups, and families. The model is also used in community practice, primarily when the objective is to help people organize to help themselves.
Group Facilitator
A group facilitator is one who serves as a leader for group activity. The group may be a therapy group, an educational group, a self-help group, a sensitivity group, a family therapy group, or a group with some other focus.
Guardian
This role of social worker involves taking actions that include a social control function or protecting clients who are not capable of protecting themselves. The guardianship involves legal intervention to protect the vulnerable (Pardeck et al., 1996).
Mediator
This role of social worker focuses on actions taken when the social worker’s objective is to settle opposing or disparate points of view and bring the contestants together in united action. The mediator’s role is to intervene in disputes between parties and assist them in finding compromises, reconciling differences, or reaching mutually satisfactory agreements. Social workers have used their value orientations and unique skills in many forms of mediation.
Examples of target groups in which mediation has been used include disputes that involve divorcing spouses, neighbors in conflict, landlord-tenant disputes, labor-management disputes, and child custody disputes. Mediators remain neutral, do not side with either party and make sure they understand the positions of both parties. They may help to clarify positions, identify miscommunication about differences, and help those involved present their cases clearly.
Negotiator
A negotiator brings together those who are in conflict over one or more issues and seeks to achieve bargaining and compromise to arrive at mutually acceptable agreements. Similar to mediation, negotiation entails seeking a compromise that is acceptable to all parties involved. However, unlike a mediator, who has a neutral role, a negotiator usually is allied with one of the sides involved.
Public Speaker
Social workers occasionally are recruited to talk to various groups (such as school classes, public service organizations, police officers, and staff at other agencies) to inform them of available services or to advocate for new services. In recent years, a variety of needed services have been identified (for example, runaway centers, services for battered spouses, rape crisis centers, services for people with AIDS, and group homes for youths). Social workers who have public-speaking skills can explain services to groups of potential clients (Zestrow, 2004).
Researcher
Every social worker is, at times, a researcher. Research in social work practice includes studying the literature on topics of interest, evaluating the outcomes of one’s practice, assessing the merits and shortcomings of programs, and studying community needs.
Conclusion
The aforementioned roles obviously do not occur in a void; often, they overlap. For example, the role of social worker as enabler and conferee are difficult to separate. Furthermore, when the practitioner implements the broker role, he or she will probably enable and advocate on behalf of the client. The complementarity among these roles is important, and they tend to cluster rather than remain distinct. This approach to practice is a significant departure from the traditional methods used in social work practice—social casework, group work, and community organization.
References
- Pardeck, J. T., Meinert, R. G., & Murphy, J. W. (1996). Social work practice: An ecological approach. AUBURN HOUSE; Westport, Connecticut, London
- Zastrow, C. (2004). Introduction to social work and social welfare: Empowering people. George Williams College of Aurora University
