DQ 2 WEEK 3 RESPONSE 4 449
Hello Professor Smith and Classmates,
Advice is when you give someone guidance or suggestion on what to do in a particular situation. For a social work setting, clients come to a social worker seeking advice on what to do when they are facing issues or certain situations they need help dealing with. Supporting a client, on the other hand, would be the social worker working with a client to understand their needs, their skills/knowledge, and the resources that they have and looking for options together to allow the client to choose which option they would like to proceed with.
One thing I found interesting in our text was where it states, “Although many clients seek advice from social workers because they see the social workers as expert problem solvers, those social workers can (wrongly) seek to expedite problem solving by quickly comparing the current situation to other similar ones encountered in the past and recommending a solution that has worked for other clients or themselves” (Hepworth, D. H., Rooney, R. H., Rooney, G. D., & Strom-Gottfried, K., 2017) Often a mistake that can happen when giving advice to a client is the social worker provides the advice too soon without having all of the facts and ends up giving advice to solutions the client may have already tried multiple times, this can become a communication barrier where the client feels they aren’t being given the chance to be heard and that the social worker is just trying to give them one singular fix and push them out the door. “Advice should be offered sparingly” (Hepworth, 2017)
An example of supporting the client without offering advice would be in the “Work with a Probation Officer: Redo of Session 1” video where the social worker does have to advise the client that the court is recommending the client enter into a treatment program, but lets him know that he has 4 options to choose from and the programs offered are not the same as when he tried treatment back in 1998. This allows the client and the social worker to follow the recommendations and guidance of the courts while still giving the client the freedom to choose how he wants to proceed in this specific situation. In this instance, this change of language and support of the client resulted in him agreeing and being willing to re-try treatment.
Respectfully,
Stephanie
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References:
Hepworth, D. H., Rooney, R. H., Rooney, G. D., & Strom-Gottfried, K. (2017). Eliminating Counterproductive Communication Patterns and Substituting Positive Alternatives. Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skills (10th ed.). Cengage Learning
