How Do Others See Us? The Image of Social Workers

Image credit: University of Tennessee at Martin

During our last class session an international student raised the question, "What does the general public think about social workers?" This is an important question, not only because it forces us to stand back and consider how we are perceived by American society, also because it prods us to consider some of the tensions between the values social work espouses (collectivism, interdependence, and process-orientation) and some of the essentials of American mythology and ideology (individualism, independence, and task-orientation).

We would like to believe, of course, that society values us and that our clients and constituents think the world of us. The fact of the matter is that many of our clients come to us involuntarily, due to a court order or as part of the requirement to get services from a public or private agency. These clients will see social workers as being agents of a bureaucracy or institution that they might, at best, feel ambivalent about. If a person sees a social worker involuntarily, the worker will have a harder time establishing themselves as a trusted resource, who can help the client to negotiate a complicated system.

Even when the client's encounter with the social worker is voluntary, they may resent the "middle class" social worker, who doesn't live in the neighborhood and is not from the community, but is being paid to work with, or deliver services to, people less income and fewer social resources. Then, of course, there are those who criticize social work when it is funded by government programs, because these people believe in a limited government. They would see the social worker as being part of an over-expanded social welfare state.

It is important for social workers to understand that all of the resistance they are getting from clients, and not all of the opposition that they get from the general public, is generated out of ignorance or mean-spiritedness. If social workers are to continue to be effective in working with clients and influencing public policy it is important for us to understand the legitimate concerns and criticism that -- or the misperceptions and misunderstanding -- that others have of social workers.

One way to get a handle on how social workers are perceived is to think about how we are depicted in mass  media. When was the last time you read a reference to a social worker in a novel, or saw a social worker depicted as a character on television or in a movie? What was the character like? What was the social work character "type"? How do you think the audience responded to this character?

What was the gender of the social worker? What was the social worker's age? What was the race or ethnicity of the social worker? What was the social work character's personality like? What motivated the social worker? How did other characters in the story respond to him or her?

Let's talk about this.

See also: Social Workers in an age of alienation

C. Matthew Hawkins