Social Group Work Models: Possession and Heritage *

Abstract

The social group work method, like all social work methods, has developed largely experientially. Yet it has done so within a framework of some kind of guiding consensus about its essential elements. Persistently, social group workers have sought to formulate a logical relationship between these elements and pragmatic solutions to the tasks that have confronted them in practice. The evolutionary efforts of group workers to describe repeated patterns of phenomena and to define practice, in the language of science, has resulted in the emergence of several different theoretical models of social group work method. The social goals model although emerging from our past, has not been discarded. Interestingly, the model has been reaffirmed as critical strains have developed in the larger society. During the war era, the McCarthy era, and now during the period of struggle for integration, world peace and economic opportunity, this model has been presenting itself for use.