How to be a Social Worker by Priscilla Dunk-West

Author:Priscilla Dunk-West [Dunk-West, Priscilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Work, Education, General
ISBN: 9781137608055
Google: 9kJmDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education
Published: 2018-08-13T03:17:07+00:00

Did you find you answered the questions in Exercise 5.1 quickly and were you surprised by any of your answers? Do you foresee that any of your values will get in the way of your development as a social worker? One person’s personal values can clash with another’s. Having completed this exercise, it is important to note that people’s values are constantly changing. This means that your responses today may differ markedly from your responses to the same questions after you have completed your course and, again, in subsequent years. Think about how your values have changed since you were at school, for example. You might feel embarrassed about some of your views in the past. Yet values change. This is because our personal values are influenced by external factors which include, for example, those around us, our education, background and culture, and our life experiences. Each new experience shifts our way of viewing the world—this commitment to lifelong learning is important to your social work self. In fact, your social work studies will likely change your values as well as the way you see the world around you.

Values are important to recognise and name because our values influence the ways in which we interact with our clients and those around us in everyday life. When we meet with clients, we must not only be aware of power and inequality, but also understand how our values can affect the service we provide (Shardlow 1995, p. 65). Values come together in practice in complex ways because:

Social workers are not autonomous professionals whose guiding ethical principles are solely about respecting and promoting the self-determination of service users. They are employed by agencies, who work within the constraints of legal and procedural rules and must also work to promote the public good or the well-being of society in general.

(Banks 2012, p. 31)

An example of how personal values come into our practice is when you believe something that a client has done is either ‘wrong’ or ‘right’. This is not to be avoided; rather, acknowledging our personal values is an important process which should emerge during reflexive practice, and may be articulated in supervision, for example. Social work students often report that their values have changed throughout the course without them consciously trying to. It is fair to say that while it is important to ‘notice’ one’s values, being open to new ways of thinking and being able to unravel values are perhaps most central to social work learning.

So far we have thought about values as they relate to ourselves, as influenced through our biography and broader socio-cultural context. In social work there are also professional values that we need to understand and integrate into our practice. In practice, our professional values can clash with one another. More specifically, this relates to what we call in social work an ‘ethical dilemma’. As we shall see, an ethical dilemma occurs when there is a clash of ethical principles. Here Richard Hugman explains:

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