Interaction theory (IT) is an approach to questions about social cognition, or how one understands other people, that focuses on bodily behaviors and environmental contexts rather than on mental processes.

2.  Developed by William Schwartz that there is
a symbolic relationship between people and
their environment, and therefore, the
function of social work is to mediate the
process through which the individual and
society reach out each other through a
mutual need for self- fulfillment.

3.  Social work’s function in society is most
powerfully expressed when it directs itself
not to the individual or the social, but to the
relationship between the two.
 the function of social work is to mediate the
transactions between people and the various
systems through which they carry on their
relationships with society- the family, the
peer group, the social agency, the
neighborhood, the school, the job, and
others.

4.  helping each individual client negotiate the
system immediately crucial to the problems
 helping the reach out to incorporate the
client, deliver its service, and thus carry out
its function in the community

5.  The social worker has a two- client
responsibility
a. the worker addresses each member, whose
relationship to the group this member
needs to negotiate, and the group as a
whole, that has to negotiate the larger
system of which it is part- the agency, the
neighborhood.
b. the group is described as an alliance of
moving, interdependent beings, with the
worker being one of them.

6.  The group is a collective in which people
face and interact with each other
 the people need each other for certain
specific purposes
 people come together to work on common
task
 the work is embedded in a relevant agency
function

7. o Assumptions that can be made about the
laws of nature appropriate to the tasks of
the worker
o the valued outcomes that need to be
brought about, and
o the implementing acts which the worker
may have to do