Strengths-based perspectives and resiliency assessments help inform best practices that can be adopted by social workers when dealing with clients and help in case planning and crisis intervention. Crisis intervention requires understanding the client’s family background and how they are generally poised to handle physical and emotional pressure. Understanding the strengths and resiliency assessment and how they assist with best practices helps develop a structured crisis intervention plan that social workers can use to diagnose a situation effectively.
Strengths-based, resilience-oriented approaches are required to shift the focus from how families have failed to how they can be successful. The strengths-based perspective reveals to a family or social worker how to identify and explore, embellish and exploit families’ strengths and resources to achieve their goals, nurture their dreams and overcome the lack of confidence (Suparit et al., 2023). The perspective trusts a family’s creativity and innate courage under pressure. Family social workers can use the perspective to adopt a unique lens to view the family, its environments, difficulties and the capacity to leverage the existing internal and external resources.
Resilience involves the family’s ability to respond positively to adverse events and emerge more strengthened and confident. It includes characteristics, properties and dimensions that help families overcome disruptions when facing a crisis (Suparit et al., 2023). In crisis intervention, resilience is the ability to turn on despite the challenges and believe that as much as trauma might be unpleasant, it is also instructive and transformative. Resilient families believe in their capabilities and know their present risks and protection (Saint-Jacques et al., 2009). Resilient families have the strengths and resources to propel them forward and overcome their adversities even when stressed.
Strengths and resiliency assessments also enable family social workers to work with the family to establish the meanings embedded in family difficulties. Strong family bonds allow members to approach problems collaboratively. When exploring a family from the strengths perspective, family social workers integrate the ecological and developmental perspectives to understand the family functioning within the sociocultural contexts effectively. Resilience is a process that best develops through supportive contexts and relationship building (Suparit et al., 2023). Therefore, strength-based perspective and resiliency assessment provide social workers with the insights to understand significant family relationships and how they can help build resilience toward overcoming potential challenges (Saint-Jacques et al., 2009). Family resilience also builds on parental strengths while recognizing the potential limitations in the areas where to grow (Caiels et al., 2021). Therefore, identifying the strengths and limitations will realign the assessment and intervention and shift from the deficit-based perspective that views individuals as dysfunctional and damaged.
Using the strengths-based assessment, family social workers seek to relegate problems to a secondary position behind strengths. This might be difficult and counterproductive when the situation seems too severe to be ignored, for instance, behaviours likely to cause harm or injury to a family member. From the Circumplex Model of Family Functioning perspectives, one can deduce that families are cohesive units and that adaptable families are better positioned to handle complex family challenges and maintain resilience (Saint-Jacques et al., 2009). Therefore, the strengths-based perspective capitalizes on the individual and family strengths that enable one to develop resilience.
Finally, resilience and stressors are predominant in the family. Stressors are problematic because they affect children to the extent that they disrupt critical family relationships. Resilient families are lucky because they can overcome these stressors. Therefore, adopting a strengths-based perspective coupled with family resilience ensures that family social workers can adequately diagnose a troubling situation and implement effective corrective measures such as recommending therapy or psychosocial support.
References
Caiels, J., Milne, A., & Beadle-Brown, J. (2021). Strengths-Based Approaches in Social Work and Social Care: Reviewing the Evidence. Journal of Long Term Care, pp. 401–422. https://doi.org/10.31389/jltc.102
Saint-Jacques, M.-C., Turcotte, D., & Pouliot, E. (2009). Adopting a Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice with Families in Difficulty: From Theory to Practice. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 90(4), 454–461. https://doi.org/10.1606/1044-3894.3926
Suparit, S., Sakunpong, N., & Junprasert, T. (2023). Family resilience processes among guardians caring for children and youths with leukaemia. Heliyon, 9(6), e17205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17205
write