Basic Concepts and Methods of Social Work
The four primary methods
- Social casework - one-to-one, systematic helping to improve person-in-situation functioning. Mary Richmond's Social Diagnosis (1917) is the founding text. Tools: interview, professional relationship, home visit, collateral contact, recording.
- Social group work - purposeful use of group experience for growth or task achievement. Roots in settlements and YMCA/YWCA work; Trecker's principles stress democratic participation and programme as a tool, not an end.
- Community organisation - planned effort to meet needs, mobilise resources and build integration; Murray Ross's definition is the standard quotation. Processes: need identification, planning, resource mobilisation, participation, evaluation.
- Social action - organised pressure to change policy, structures or unjust practice. Gandhi's satyagraha and Alinsky's organising are the two classic models; it is conflict-based and takes sides.
Secondary methods
Social welfare administration and social work research support the primary methods. Social action is sometimes listed as a sub-method of community organisation; if a question names four primary methods, treat it as primary.
Choosing the method
Numbers and goal decide. A person in crisis → casework. Adolescents with low self-esteem → group work. A colony without safe water → community organisation. A legally due benefit denied → social action with legal literacy.
Worked example
Twenty coastal families lack safe drinking water. Individual relief is a casework response and earns half marks. The expected answer is community organisation: form a residents' committee, map needs, approach the panchayat, file an RTI query, and converge Jal Jeevan Mission and MGNREGA funds. If the panchayat stonewalls after documented negotiation, escalate to social action.
Traps
Calling every gathering "group work" - a film show without a worker's purposeful role is not group work; describing social action as violence; treating community organisation as a one-day event instead of a process.