The ecological perspective is an approach to social work practice that addresses the complex transactions between people and their environment. A broad frame work that synthesizes ideas from a number of human behavior and social work practice theories, the ecological perspective offers a rich, eclectic social work knowledge and practice base.

1. The ecological perspective in social work
MR.ABILASH CHANDRAN
Faculty of Department of Social Work
Christ college, IJK
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2. THE ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE IN SOCIAL WORK
• Germain introduced an ecological metaphor as a perspective for
practice in social casework more than 20 years ago. Despite social
work's historical commitment to the person in-environment, most
direct practice had not gone beyond the individual's internal
processes and the family's interpersonal processes. Attention to
physical and social environments and culture, and to their
reciprocal relationships with people, was rare.
• This inattention was due mainly to the lack of available concepts
about environments and culture and how they affect and are
affected by human development and functioning. Most if not all
work with the environment had been limited to securing
information about clients from family members, landlords, former
employers, friends, and neighbors and to providing financial aid and
services such as foster care.
• As important as social provision is, physical and social
environments also must be understood and worked with as people
interact with them. Earth Day 1965 highlighted the environment as
more than a static setting in which people's lives are played out, and
concepts from ecology gradually came to the fore, supplementing
the related work of Bartlett and Gordon
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3. • Ecology, the biological science that studies organism–environment
relations, offered Concepts of these relations that were less abstract than
those offered by systems theories and closer to common human experience.
Used metaphorically, the concepts could enable a practitioner and a client
to keep a simultaneous focus on person and environment and on their
reciprocal relationship. Hence, certain concepts have been singled out as
appropriate for social work and congruent with its purpose.
• They hold the promise of extending social workers' understanding of the
interacting personal, environmental, and cultural factors involved in
complicated troubled situations and of increasing the quality of help offered
to clients to modify their situations. Practice principles derived from the
concepts are aimed at promoting individual and family health, growth, and
satisfying social functioning.
• The conceptual framework of the ecological perspective was later elaborated
and refined. As time passed, it became clear that the capacity of ecological
concepts to implement social work's commitment to the person and the
environment was helpful not only in practice with individuals, families,
groups, and organizations but also with communities and in political
advocacy. The first part of this entry reviews the original concepts and their
further refinement and describes in detail newly added concepts of coercive
power, exploitative power, and “life courses.” The second part briefly
describes the Life Model practice approach that is derived from the
ecological concepts.
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4. • Social work involves, at its core, work with interconnected transactional
networks. The ecosystems perspective has been almost universally accepted
in social work because it provides a framework for thinking about and
understanding those networks in their complexity. This strategy for viewing
the world can at first seem rather abstract, so it may be useful to explore
why it was developed and has been so widely adopted. Since the beginning
of the profession, practice has been focused on the person and the
environment.
• This "psychosocial" focus is as important as a distinguishing feature of
social work that it has become its identified purpose: to address the
psychosocial matrix of which individuals, families, groups, and
communities are constituents. Although the person-in-environment
concept has governed practice since the work of Mary Richmond nearly a
century ago and has been defined and redefined over the years, its
hyphenated structure has contributed to a continuing imbalance in
emphasis on the person or the environment.
• As a result, practitioners have often attended primarily to one or the other,
missing key dimensions of the case. For example, a child who refused to
attend school might have been treated for depression, with limited or no
attention paid to the role of his school or his family in his behavior.
Conversely, attention only to serious dysfunction in a school or a family
might have led to ignoring the plight of the child’s response. Often,
practitioners have selected a focus that was compatible with their
preferences, assigning peripheral status to either the person or
environment.
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5. • The ecological perspective is an approach to social work practice that
addresses the complex transactions between people and their environment.
A broad frame work that synthesizes ideas from a number of human
behavior and social work practice theories, the ecological perspective offers
a rich, eclectic social work knowledge and practice base. Bronfenbrenner,
one of the best known developmental psychologists in the ecological
tradition, has defined the ecological approach to human behavior as the
“scientific study of the progressive, mutual accommodation, throughout the
life course between an active, growing human being and his or her
environment”.
• The ecological perspective makes clear the need to view people and
environments as a unitary system within a particular cultural and historic
context. Both person and environment can be fully understood only in
terms of their relationship, in which each continually influences the other
within a particular context.
• Hence, all concepts derived from the ecological metaphor refer not to
environment alone or person alone; rather, each concept expresses a
particular person: environment relationship, whether it is positive,
negative, or neutral. Another aspect of the ecological perspective is
“ecological thinking,” a mode of thought that differs markedly from linear
thinking. The latter can explain some simple phenomena. Ecological
thinking can explain complex human phenomena, such as those that enter
the social work domain.
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6. • The ecological/systems perspective makes a number of valuable
contributions as an organizing frame work for social work practice.
• The ecological /system perspective allows one to deal with far more
data than other models, and to bring order to these large amounts of
data from a variety of disciplines.
• The concepts relating to systems are equally applicable to the wide
range of clients served by social workers, including individuals,
families, groups, organizations, communities and society.
• The ecological/systems framework allows for identifying the wide
range of factors that have an impact on social welfare problems,
their interrelationships, and the ways that a change in one factor
affects other factors.
• The ecological/systems framework shifts attention from
characteristics of individuals or the environment to the transactions
between systems and their communication patterns.
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7. • The ecological/systems framework views individuals as
actively involved with their environments, capable of adaption
and change.
• The ecological/systems framework views systems as goal
oriented, supporting client’s self determination and the
client’s participation in the change process.
• If systems require constant transactions with each other to
survive, the social worker’s purpose is to provide and
maintain opportunities for transactions for all populations
and to work to reduce isolation of individuals and systems.
• Social workers need to work ensure that change the tension
are not resisted in systems and to remove the notion that
change and conflict and pathological.
• Social workers must be aware of the systems within which
they work and how change within those systems affects the
whole. This means that social workers must choose points of
intervention with care
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8. • The ecosystems perspective has been almost universally accepted in
social work because it provides a framework for thinking about and
understanding those networks in their complexity. This
"psychosocial" focus is as important as a distinguishing feature of
social work that it has become its identified purpose: to address the
psychosocial matrix of which individuals, families, groups, and
communities are constituents. Although the person-in-environment
concept has governed practice since the work of Mary Richmond
nearly a century ago and has been defined and redefined over the
years, its hyphenated structure has contributed to a continuing
imbalance in emphasis on the person or the environment.
• As a result, practitioners have often attended primarily to one or
the other, missing key dimensions of the case. For example, a child
who refused to attend school might have been treated for
depression, with limited or no attention paid to the role of his school
or his family in his behavior. Conversely, attention only to serious
dysfunction in a school or a family might have led to ignoring the
plight of the child’s response. Often, practitioners have selected a
focus that was compatible with their preferences, assigning
peripheral status to either the person or environment.
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9. • Another consequence of the perceived separation of the
person-in environment construct has been the tendency
of practitioners to avoid environmental interventions in
favor of changing people in isolation from their life
situations–because the environment is often seen as so
intractable and so difficult to affect.
• This emphasis has been encouraged by the development
of extensive knowledge regarding human behavior and
development, as contrasted with a less-well developed,
cohesive knowledge of the environment. Clinical social
workers’ choice to focus on the person to the exclusion of
the environment may also have had something to do
with the view that their professional status was
dependent on their engaging in practice similar to
psychiatrists and psychotherapists
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10. • The psychosocial purposes of social work were being eroded,
and the person-in-environment construct did not appear to be
helping. The problem was real, and profoundly affected work
with clients. Beyond these consequences for direct practice,
the severe social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s brought
awakened populations calling for social services.
• Previously noticed mainly in public services, poor people,
members of ethnic and racial minority groups, women, people
with severe social problems, and those with new lifestyles
demanded help from social workers in the voluntary sector.
Problems such as child abuse, family violence, AIDS, and
homelessness caused all professions to redefine their
approaches to account for the evident psychosocial features of
these problems.
• By 1970 it became clear that it was essential to review and
rethink the person in environment construct so that social
workers would find it more possible to intervene in a more
transactional fashion in cases that were clearly psychosocial
events.
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