PAC 411 Module 1 The Social Work Profession and Its History Example

Casework and Settlement: The Two Roots of Social Work and What They Mean for Addiction Practice Today

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Psychology and Addiction Studies Program, Aspen University

PAC 411: Social Work as a Profession

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Casework and Settlement: The Two Roots of Social Work and What They Mean for Addiction Practice Today

In her first week at Westgate Community Services, an invented multiservice agency in St. Louis, Missouri, a newly hired social worker in the addiction program asked her supervisor why her job description included both individual counseling and "community advocacy," including testifying at city council hearings about recovery housing. Her supervisor answered that the job reflects the history of the profession, which has always done both. This paper traces that history for Westgate's new staff. The agency and its staff are composites, while the books and articles cited are real.

Casework and the Charity Organization Societies

In the late nineteenth century, charity organization societies in American cities sought to make relief to the poor more systematic. Volunteers called friendly visitors went to the homes of applicants to assess their situation. The approach often carried moral judgments, distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor, but it also produced the first systematic method of helping individuals and families. Richmond (1917), who began her career in these societies, set out that method in Social Diagnosis. She described casework as a process of gathering evidence from many sources, including the client, family, employers, doctors and schools, weighing that evidence and forming a diagnosis of the person's situation that would guide a plan of help. Richmond insisted that the social worker understand the whole person in his or her social setting, not only the presenting problem.

Settlement Houses and Social Reform

At the same time, the settlement house movement took a different approach. Addams (1910) described the founding of Hull-House in Chicago in 1889, where she and other educated women lived among immigrant families in a poor neighborhood. Rather than visiting the poor to assess them, settlement workers lived as neighbors, offering clubs, classes, child care and cultural programs. They also studied the conditions around them, such as overcrowded housing, unsafe factories and child labor, and campaigned for laws to change them. Addams and her colleagues saw poverty as largely the product of social and economic conditions rather than individual failings.

Flexner's Challenge

In 1915, the educator Abraham Flexner, known for his influential report on medical education, addressed a national conference of social workers. In the address, reprinted much later (Flexner, 2001), he set out criteria for a profession, among them work that calls for individual judgment, grounding in scientific knowledge, a practical aim, methods that can be taught to newcomers, an organized membership and service to the public. He concluded that social work did not yet qualify. Social workers, he argued, served largely as mediators who connected clients with other professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, and lacked a specific technique and body of knowledge of their own.

The address stung, but it shaped the profession. Social work schools multiplied, professional associations formed and Richmond's casework method was taken up as the kind of transmissible technique Flexner said was missing. Over the following century, social work developed its own education standards, licensing and code of ethics.

Comparing the Traditions

How the Profession Answered Flexner

Over the following decades, social work answered Flexner's criteria one by one. Schools of social work, many attached to universities, developed curricula that taught casework as a transmissible method. Professional associations formed and eventually merged into a national organization. Journals published research on practice. A code of ethics set out the profession's commitments, and states began licensing social workers. Some historians argue that in pursuing professional status the field leaned too heavily toward individual casework, modeled on psychiatry, and away from the settlement tradition's reform work, a tension that resurfaced in the 1960s when social workers returned to community organizing and the war on poverty. The tension between treating individuals and changing conditions remains part of the profession's identity.

The Dual Focus Today

The profession that grew from these roots kept both traditions. Social workers work with individuals and families, and they also address the environments and policies that shape people's lives. This dual focus distinguishes social work from many other helping professions, which concentrate on the individual. It is written into social work education, which requires students to learn practice with individuals and families alongside practice with organizations and communities, and into the profession's ethics, which name social justice as a core value.

What the History Means for Addiction Social Work

For Westgate's new social worker, the history explains her job. When she counsels a client in early recovery, assessing his situation, his family, his work and his health and building a plan with him, she practices in Richmond's tradition. When she testifies at city council in favor of zoning that allows recovery housing, or documents how few treatment slots exist for uninsured residents, she practices in Addams's. Addiction is a field where both are needed. A client's recovery depends on his own motivation and skills, and also on whether he has a safe place to live, whether treatment is affordable and whether employers will hire someone with a record.

The history also carries a warning, and it is one that addiction programs in particular need to hear. Early charity work's distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor has echoes in how people with addiction are still judged. Social workers in addiction programs can draw on the settlement tradition's insistence that conditions, not character alone, shape people's lives.

Conclusion

Social work grew from two traditions: casework, set out in Richmond's Social Diagnosis, and the settlement movement described in Addams's account of Hull-House. Flexner's challenge pushed the profession to define its methods and knowledge. Westgate's new social worker inherits both traditions, and her job, counseling clients and advocating for change, is the history of the profession in a single position.

References

Addams, J. (1910). Twenty years at Hull-House. Macmillan.

Flexner, A. (2001). Is social work a profession? Research on Social Work Practice, 11(2), 152-165. https://doi.org/10.1177/104973150101100202 (Original work published 1915)

Richmond, M. E. (1917). Social diagnosis. Russell Sage Foundation.