Towards an Alternative Model of Social Groupwork

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper arose from our disagreement with some of the suggestions in an earlier article in this journal (Brown et al., 1982). Before and since, we have both worked in and studied numerous examples of groups of a type which, according to Brown and his coauthors, scarcely exists in British social work practice. This paper explains what we believe to be the actual significance of the type of group work we refer to as 'self-directed', together with our view of its place within wider social work, community work, and groupwork practice. We also give examples of such groups and conclude that their proliferation would enable workers to go beyond the alleviation of individual distress into the achievement of external change. We have recently undertaken a study of certain aspects of groupwork. One of our main goals has been to analyze the methodology of social action groupwork with young people in care and in trouble. We have been closely involved in developing this approach in and around Nottingham, as well as in national extensions of this work (Ward, 1982; Mullender, 1983). We also wanted to discover whether this type of group with young people was an isolated phenomenon. We strongly suspected that practitioners working with other client groups were making similar moves towards the use of groupwork primarily to achieve external change, as opposed to concentrat ing on changing the attitudes or behaviour of group members themselves.