Techniques and Guidelines for Social Work Practice

Carefully updated to provide social workers with easy access to the most current information on professional techniques and guidelines and organized to support a generalist practice perspective, Techniques and Guidelines for Social Work Practice illustrates multiple ways in which both direct and indirect intervention activities are a part of the social worker's repertoire. Touching upon everything from cultural competence to macro practice, the content of this text is so widely applicable it is an invaluable aid in making the transition to a professional career in social work and a staple of professional social work libraries. In a classroom, it is ideal for use in advanced practice, capstone, and field work courses. Parts I and II summarize the essential foundation elements of social work practice, while Parts III through V set out 157 clearly described techniques and guidelines that can be used by students and new practitioners.

The latest edition includes many changes that make it just as essential as previous editions. Techniques deleted from prior editions due to space restrictions are now available at www.ablongman.com/sheafor7e. New techniques include guidelines for assessing small group functioning, family group conferencing, and building mentoring relationships, as well as addressing client concerns related to spirituality and religion and serving the client or community experiencing an emergency or disaster. Following the lessons of 9/11, new content is included to prepare social workers to deal a client or community emergency. Information is included on Family group conferencing, a new approach based on the principles of restorative justice about which social workers should be knowledgeable. New guidelines for using mentoring relationships, in which senior practitioners without direct administrative responsibilities support and nurture developing social workers, are included in this edition, along with new guidelines for assessing small group functioning as a means of strengthening subsequent intervention activities with groups. Chapter 14 now includes a straight-forward description of techniques for conducting empirical direct practice evaluation with current illustrations based on students' applications of the most commonly used evaluation tools.