Social Work Now, Issue 39, pages 5-14.
Theory, research, and practice in social work are inescapably intertwined. Each can inform and enrich the others. As a clinical scholar, educator, and practitioner over the past three decades, I have endeavoured to integrate the three in the development of a family resilience framework to guide intervention and prevention efforts with families facing serious life challenges. I have also found it essential to bridge theory and research on ‘normal’ human development in the social sciences with preoccupations in the field of mental health on individual psychopathology and family deficits.
Early in my career I was drawn to the field of family therapy, which was just flowering in the late 1960s. It was refreshing to cast off deterministic theories of early childhood, maternal causality for individual problems. As we have come to realise, views of normality, health, and dysfunction are socially constructed, permeating all research and clinical transactions, assessments, and aims. Moreover, with social and economic transformations of recent decades, theory, research, and practice must be relevant to the growing cultural diversity and multiplicity of family kinship arrangements.
Systems-oriented family process research has provided empirical grounding to assess healthy family functioning (see Walsh, 2003b). Yet, family patterns differing from the norm are too often pathologised, particularly when distressed families seek help. Moreover, family typologies tend to be static and acontextual, offering a snapshot of intra-familial patterns without consideration of family challenges, resources, and socio-cultural influences. I thought the concept of resilience could be more relevant and valuable for practice. By definition, it involves strengths in the context of stress and is flexible in relation to varied life conditions. Over the past decade, I have developed a family resilience framework, building on collaborative, strengthsbased practice approaches, that can take us to another level by tapping into a family’s resources and potential to master their life challenges.