Content area
Full Text
SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE: CONCEPTS, PROCESSES, & INTERVIEWING. Marion Bogo. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, 310 pp.
Marion Bogo is to be appreciated for her acknowledgment of social work students' and practitioners' understandable frustration with the welter of theoretical and practice information, which flows around us in a formless manner. How are busy, dedicated providers of social services at whatever level to both serve clients and have some assurance that they are guided by the best available evidence?
Use of Field Research
Dr. Bogo organizes her textbook around the social work interview and supporting research. What she does not present is refreshing, that is, there is no formulaic, linear approach. In a deliberate, reader-friendly fashion, she describes the forces that could affect the central concern, the interview. The book is divided into three parts: the concepts which undergird social work practice; how the stages of the process of helping clients is influenced by those concepts; and interviewing skills that express appropriate concepts using appropriate processes (tasks).
Her conclusions are based in part upon her own and colleagues' research efforts, that is, a study on cross-cultural counseling by Tsang, Bogo, and George (2003), which entailed an analysis of audiotapes of workers and clients and found frequent examples of interviewing by workers that was very effective. The social workers in the above research utilized the skills that Bogo presents in her text, and it was found that "clients responded in a way that led to furthering their mutual understanding of the issues to be addressed. As a result, engagement was successful and clients evidenced positive outcomes from the counseling" (p. 230). This type of field research is needed in social work as the time pressure does not favor practitioners studiously searching for practice models. Marion Bogo has contributed an intuitively satisfying, easy-to-understand practice model that incorporates historical and current influences on practice, and gives suggestions that do not overwhelm. Additionally, she includes research that supports various techniques or theories under discussion.
Integration of Theory and Practice Model (ITP LOOP)
Having neatly divided her text into manageable portions, Bogo describes a practice template, the ITP Loop Model. The ITP Loop reflects ways concepts, processes, and interviewing skills interrelate and link in a non-linear, non-compartmentalized fashion. Though Bogo...