Genre Guide

Section

Your skills involved

1. present the case

• Describe the individual, or family 

individual case – age, occupation, family make-up, events that have brought the case to the attention of the social worker.

e,g, Wing-sum, a 12-year old school girl, lives with her parents, and a younger brother in a public housing estate.          

• Describe / narrate events that brought the case to the social worker (Activity  –   Description and Narration)

e.g. The mother came with her to see the social worker.  The event that brought them to the social worker was that the daughter attempted suicide by jumping out of a window.

2. give background information about the case

• Identify clearly the relevant information in order to establish the background and causes of the individual or family’s areas of need

• When describing cause and effect relationships, it is sometimes better to use tentative language to show that the causation may not be 100% certain.

e.g. Helena suffered from bad quality sleep, which likely affected   her performance at work. This could have aggravated the already strained relationship between the couple.

• Can reflect the service user’s view of their situation by including direct speech.

e.g.The relation between the daughter (case) and her parents deteriorated after she started secondary school. One time, the mother used a clothes hanger to physically punish the daughter because of her behavioural problems at school and unsatisfactory schools results. The mother locked the daughter in her room. The mother was crying when she said this.

3. assess the case

• Cite discipline-related theories, or concepts from lectures or reading materials to assess the case

e.g. ​Another characteristic of a good ego in functioning, as Lloyd suggests (1965), is that it can tell what is important and what is trivial, and can prioritize, focusing on one thing at a time.

• Use non-integral citation to highlight the content of the theory itself.

e.g. When the ego is weak, the person can suffer from the tension between the impulse from the id and the harsh, unapproving response from the superego (Lloyd, 1965).

4. design an intervention plan

• Start by describing the goals and objectives of the intervention plan.

e.g. The goal of the proposed intervention plan is to strengthen the ego’s capacity to endure and adapt to frustration.

• Then describe your approach or methods

e.g. In addition to providing psychological help, the worker should emphasize the help the mother needs in order to learn to manage such problems as how to feed, discipline, and toilet-train the child.

Use of such facilities as pre-school nurseries, special education classes, day care centres, and sheltered workshops should be made available when they can be used appropriately.

Moreover, the mother should be given an opportunity to be away from the child at recurring intervals.

Now, try an activity on designing an Intervention Plan

5. reflection (often required)

• Often, you are free to respond to any part in the process of writing up a case assessment report, e.g. the experience of the individual in the case, or possible solutions, or theories used to understand the case
• Response can be personal, or impersonal, depending on the chosen aspect for reflection.
• Quality of the reflection probably lies in the depth of the reflection, or how clearly you are showing you have learnt from the experience.