Role of Social Worker
Social worker plays various types of roles in catering the needs of his clients. As care giver he counsel and support people with problems in a therapeutic way to promote change. As a consultant he works with individual and groups to assist in their problems and programs. As a broker he helps people to reach services they need and make the system more useful. As a mobilizer he tries to bring new resources to individual and groups.
As an evaluator he evaluates the weakness and strengths of individual and groups, their need and problems. As an advocate he works for the improvement of policies and laws in order to make system more effective.
Barker (1987) has described the following roles of social workers:
- Enabler Role
The enabler role is the responsibility to help the client become capable of coping with situation of transitional stress. Specific skills used in achieving this objective include conveying hope, reducing resistance and ambivalence, recognizing and managing feelings, identifying and supporting personal strengths and breaking down problems into parts that can be solved more readily, and maintaining a focus on goals and the means of achieving them. - Facilitator Role
The facilitator role is the responsibility to expedite the change effort by bringing together people and lines of communications, channeling their activities and resources and providing them with access to expertise. - Activist Role
According to Barker social activists alert the general public about social problems or injustices and garner support to alleviate these conditions. Social activists mobilize resources, build coalitions, take legal actions and lobby for legislation. They create just social policies as well as initiate new funding or funding reallocations which address there identified priority issues. Social activist empower community based efforts to resolve community issues, redress social injustice and generate social reform. - Educator Role
The educator role includes the responsibility to teach clients necessary adaptive skills. This is done by providing information in a way that is understandable to the client, offering advice and suggestions, identifying alternatives and their probable consequences, modeling behaviors, teaching problem solving technique and clarifying perceptions. - Mobilizer Role
The mobilizer role is the responsibility to help people and organizations combine their resources to achieve goals of mutual importance. This is accomplished by bringing clients together, enhancing lines of communication, clarifying goals and steps to achieve them and devising plans for gaining greater support.