Family social workers often assess difficulties before making any recommendations regarding potential solutions to family problems. The professionals often utilize various frameworks and instruments for assessment. One of such tools is Family Categories Schema, which features eight areas of family functioning (Collins, Jordan, & Coleman, 2013).
Analyzing each one of these areas allows social workers to determine issues and how problems are interrelated with each other. Because family prosperity and family strengths are closely related, the specialists may use Family Categories Schema in order to identify and cultivate the advantages of the family. They, in turn, will serve as a critical contributor to positive family results. This paper covers two elements of the schema and discusses some of the potential strengths related to each area. Such information will be valuable because it will help identify common strengths without spending additional time on careful examination.
Problem Solving
Physical and emotional problems are common in almost all families. The family health is not determined by how few issues the family has, but by how these challenges are faced and resolved. Therefore, problem-solving is one of the most critical areas in the Family Categories Schema (Collins et al., 2013). Potential strengths that allow families to cope with the threats are an ability to recognize the problem, effective communication in regard to the challenge, a collaborative approach to brainstorming potential solutions, successfully acting upon the issue, consistent monitoring of efforts, and adequately evaluating success.
Fundamentally, the strengths resemble a successful implementation of each step of the effective problem-solving process (Collins et al., 2013). Identifying some of these strengths will allow the social worker to determine which parts of the process are not working correctly and provide the family with appropriate interventions.
Communication
Proper communication is a vital factor that determines the health of the family. The research suggests that happy families feature an exceptional level of communication and mutual understanding (Duncan & McLane, 2018). However, the notion of communication is complex because it serves two functions – delivering messages and defining the nature of the relationship between a speaker and a listener (Collins et al., 2013).
Potential strengths regarding the quality of communication are clear and consistent messaging, trustworthiness and truthfulness, mutual empathy, absence of blaming, and positive interactions, including humor. Such conditions facilitate problem-solving, and conflict resolution, because mutual understanding and adequate information exchange are the primary factors behind collaborative problem-solving. Communicational strengths are able to complement other shortcomings of the family because they allow the family to approach a problem collectively, stay united, promote fairness, and make decisions together. Excellent communication also means adequate listening skills, which contribute to the avoidance of issues. In families with pronounced communication strengths, challenges can be dealt with much more comfort.
Conclusion
Family strengths are more critical than the problems they are facing because conflicts are resolved more efficiently when the family features the necessary foundation. Family Categories Schema provides social workers with a framework that can be used to identify both the difficulties and opportunities within the family. Although the schema consists of eight areas, problem-solving and communication can be considered as the most important because issues often arise because of miscommunication and the absence of an effective problem-resolution process. Identifying family strengths in these two areas can be decisive in terms of successfully overcoming challenges.
References
Collins, D., Jordan, C., & Coleman, H. (2013). An introduction to family social work (4th Ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Duncan, S. F., & McLane, K. (2018). Family Strengths: Communication. Forever Families, 60(1). Web.