Relationship between Social Work and Practice (Essay Sample)

Relationship between Social Work and Practice
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Relationship between Social Work and Practice
One of the primary objective of social work is to help individuals meet their needs and improve their well-being. The professional training on social work aims at equipping social workers with knowledge that enable them to respond to the diverse client’s needs (Gentle-Genitty et al., 2014). However, it is important to deconstruct the relationship between social work knowledge and practice while dealing with real clients. Some scholars maintain that training social workers is unnecessary because the theoretical knowledge gained is sometimes invalid and applied inappropriately in practice.
In most cases, social work involves working with different social groups and helping them overcome interpersonal difficulties, protecting their fundamental rights and promoting their overall wellbeing. Social work professionals work to protect vulnerable individuals from any harm and ensuring that they can access the necessary support to meet their needs. This may range from helping families experiencing financial problems, to helping individuals with mental health problems, problematic substance use disorders, and other complex health conditions. In social work, some of the key activities include handling client’s caseload, which entails assessing individuals to identify their unique needs and working with these clients, their families, and communities to develop solutions and organize support.
Unlike social work which focuses on promoting client’s wellbeing, social practice focuses on developing human embeddedness and togetherness in different situations. Città et al. (2019) defines social practice as “structures of knowledge that enable a socially shared way of ascribing meaning to the world” (p.2). Social practice relates to the rules that influence the flow of human activity in social situations. Practice is different from social work because it focuses on the different human activities that occur in different social situations. Understanding social practice can help significantly in ensuring that social work seeks to address various challenges th