Social Work with Individuals and Groups I: Basic Concepts of Social Casework, from Social Roles and Social Functioning to the Person-in-Environment Fit, its Principles and Components, and the Diagnostic, Functional, Problem-Solving, Task-Centred and Radical Approaches

Social roles are the patterns of behaviour expected of a person in a status: parent, spouse, worker, student, patient. Many problems brought to caseworkers are role problems: a role one cannot perform (a disabled breadwinner), roles that conflict (a woman who is both carer and earner), a role lost (a widow, a retired worker) or a new role for which one is unprepared (a first-time mother, a migrant). Social functioning is the interaction between a person's coping capacity and the demands of the environment; it is effective when role demands and capacities match. Need assessment identifies which needs, material, emotional, social, informational or legal, are unmet, and ranks them; Maslow's hierarchy is often used to decide what to address first, which is why a hungry family's food precedes counselling. Adaptation, a central idea of the ecological perspective, is the continuous, reciprocal process by which people change their environments and are changed by them.

The social environment includes the family, the neighbourhood, the workplace, institutions and the wider social, economic and cultural conditions. Person-in-environment is the profession's signature idea: the client is always understood in their situation, and the situation is part of the assessment and a possible target of change. Florence Hollis called her approach "person-in-situation". The Person-in-Environment (PIE) classification system, published by the National Association of Social Workers in 1994 and edited by James Karls and Karin Wandrei, turns the idea into an assessment tool with four factors: social functioning problems (in social roles), environmental problems, mental health problems and physical health problems. Person-environment fit is the degree of match between a person's needs, capacities and goals and the resources and demands of the environment; poor fit, rather than a defect in either, is what casework tries to improve.

Felix Biestek's The Casework Relationship (1957) derived seven principles from seven basic needs that clients bring to the relationship. The need to be treated as an individual gives the principle of individualisation; the need to express feelings, purposeful expression of feelings; the need for a sympathetic response, controlled emotional involvement; the need to be recognised as a person of worth, acceptance; the need not to be judged, the non-judgemental attitude; the need to make one's own choices, client self-determination; and the need to keep secrets, confidentiality. Biestek defined the relationship itself as "the dynamic interaction of attitudes and emotions between the caseworker and the client, with the purpose of helping the client achieve a better adjustment between himself and his environment".

The components of casework are Perlman's four Ps: the person, a man, woman or child who needs help with some aspect of social or emotional living; the problem, arising from some need or obstacle that undermines social functioning; the place, the agency with its function, policies and resources; and the process, the progressive transactions between worker and client through which help is given. Indian textbooks often add two more, the professional person (the caseworker, with their knowledge, skill and values) and provisions (the concrete resources and services available), making six Ps.

In the 1930s and 1940s American casework divided into two schools. The diagnostic school, centred on the New York School of Social Work, built on Richmond's method and on Freudian psychoanalysis, and later on ego psychology. Its leading writers were Gordon Hamilton (Theory and Practice of Social Case Work, 1940) and Florence Hollis (Casework: A Psychosocial Therapy, 1964). It saw help as study, diagnosis and treatment: the worker gathers a social history, forms a diagnosis of the person-in-situation, including dynamic, clinical and etiological diagnosis, and plans treatment, which is the worker's responsibility. It gave weight to the client's past and unconscious processes, and the agency was a setting for treatment.

The functional school, centred on the Pennsylvania School of Social Work, drew on Otto Rank's psychology of will. Its leading writers were Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson, and later Ruth Smalley (Theory for Social Work Practice, 1967). It rejected "diagnosis and treatment" in favour of a helping process in which the client, exercising their own will, uses the service. The agency's function gives the process its focus, direction and limits; time is a dynamic element, with beginning, middle and ending phases used deliberately; the emphasis is on the present relationship rather than the past; and responsibility for change rests with the client, the worker's task being to release the client's capacity for growth.

Helen Harris Perlman of the University of Chicago developed the problem-solving model (1957) as a bridge between the schools. It drew on ego psychology from the diagnostic tradition, on the functional school's attention to process and the agency, and on John Dewey's analysis of how people solve problems. Casework is seen as a problem-solving process that engages the client's ego capacities; the worker helps the client to identify the problem, gather facts, think about them, choose and act, and to become a better problem-solver in the process. Perlman paid attention to the client's motivation, capacity and opportunity as the conditions for using help, and to the idea that the person's own problem-solving efforts have broken down under stress, not that the person is sick.

Task-centred casework was developed by William Reid and Laura Epstein (Task-Centered Casework, 1972), following Reid and Ann Shyne's study Brief and Extended Casework (1969), which found planned short-term casework at least as effective as open-ended casework. It is brief and time-limited, usually about six to twelve sessions over a few months; worker and client agree on a small number of target problems as the client defines them, usually no more than three; they make an explicit contract; and progress comes through tasks the client and worker carry out between sessions. Its strengths are clarity, respect for the client's definition of the problem and suitability for evaluation.

Radical casework grew from the radical social work of the 1970s, associated with Roy Bailey and Mike Brake's Radical Social Work (1975). It criticised traditional casework for "psychologising" poverty and oppression, treating structural problems as personal failings, and for acting as an agent of social control. It does not abandon work with individuals but changes its purpose: to help clients see the links between private troubles and public issues, to reduce the power gap between worker and client, to advocate for rights and entitlements, to connect clients with others in the same situation for collective action, and to raise consciousness in the Freirean sense. Feminist, structural and anti-oppressive casework continue this line.