Individual help

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Individual aid (also known as individual social aid ) is a method of social work .

In addition to social group work and community work, individual aid is one of the three basic socio-educational forms of intervention for solving psychological, material, health or social problems. Your specific strategies for coping with these problems primarily focus on the individual , the client .

Individual help is used in different areas of social work; Examples are:

Historical aspects

Individual help exists even before the professionalization of social work, e.g. B. in the charitable provision of needy by the wealthy and in the individual, mutual risk protection by medieval guilds and miners' associations.

Case work in poor relief in the USA, and in particular Mary Richmond's book Social Diagnosis (1917), is often cited as the first evidence of individual aid as a systematic instrument of social work / social pedagogy . According to a different opinion, however, earlier approaches to individualization in state welfare for the poor, e.g. B. since the Elberfeld System (Poor Order of 1852), to be taken into account. At this point in time, however, social work with individuals or families is still largely the responsibility of volunteers and is only gradually beginning to develop as a profession. Around 1900, at least in larger cities in Germany, there were advice centers for health and legal questions, seafarers' care or advice for emigrants, which were also to be regarded as early forerunners of today's individual social assistance. Furthermore, individual help is also developing in the context of newly emerging concepts of individual psychology and psychotherapy , namely Freudian psychoanalysis .

In the 1920s Alice Salomon made a significant contribution to the scientific and practical reception of the individualizing method in Germany in the interaction of state “ welfare ” and private “ welfare care ” . She characterizes the forms and tasks of the helping intervention with terms such as 'treating', 'healing' and 'caring for'.

Current aspects

In the course of the further professionalization of social work, especially from 1950 onwards, theories were developed in which - just as in social group work and community work - Anglo-American theoretical and action approaches dominate. They focus on developmental psychological or functionalistic (social work as a service) or technological, behavioristic (behavior modification) concepts.

Concepts

All concepts of individual case help assume that the most successful strategy for solving their problems is to be sought in strengthening the individual . With "help for self-help" the goal of an emancipated, authentic and (self-) responsible personality is to be achieved, who then does not need any further professional support.

The time-limited educational intervention takes place after a systematic examination of the client's psychosocial situation, its history and a qualitative finding ( anamnesis and diagnosis ). A therapeutic concept or action plan defines the goals and the course of support and should enable success control, sometimes also jointly.

The concept of “help” presupposes the willingness, consent and willingness of the clients to cooperate. Frequently described requirements for educators in individual aid are therefore sympathy, acceptance of the person and respect for the self-determination of the client, as well as confidentiality towards other people and institutions. Individual helpers use methods derived from psychotherapy, e.g. B. the person-centered conversation.

Case management

In the theory and practice of current individual case management , the term case management has become very important. It also reflects the endeavor to further professionalize social work: case workers or case managers no longer act as "helpers", but rather as success-controlled service providers according to established or verifiable professional standards.

The more important driving force behind the 'boom' of case management concepts, however, is the increasing financial crisis in public budgets, as well as the lack of quantifiability of the successes of social work in general and of individual aid in particular. Case management concepts are intended to bundle the limited financial, human and organizational resources in order to react as efficiently as possible to growing social problems (see also the article on case management with a focus on unemployment / ALG II and rehabilitation). They thus reflect the generally observable trend towards the economization of social work .

Criticism of the individual help

From the end of the 1960s onwards, the main objection to the concepts of individual aid was the accusation that they individualized socially determined problems and obscured the real causes of the conditions in which they arose. The current criticism of case management has adopted these arguments almost seamlessly.

Legal basis

In Germany, many welfare state benefits are anchored in the Social Security Code . Individual aid is granted, for example, as a benefit for

literature

  • German Association for Public and Private Welfare (Ed.): Specialized lexicon of social work . 5th edition (2002), Frankfurt: Self-published by the German Association for Public and Private Welfare.
  • Engelke, Ernst: Theories of social work. An introduction . 3rd edition (2002), Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus-Verlag
  • Galuske, Michael: Methods of Social Work . 10th edition (2013), Weinheim, Munich: Juventa Verlag
  • Hering, Sabine and Richard Münchmeier: History of social work. An introduction . 2nd edition (2003), Weinheim, Munich: Juventa Verlag
  • Kreft, Dieter and Ingrid Mielenz (Hrsg.): Dictionary of social work. Tasks, fields of practice, terms and methods of social work and social education . 5. completely revised and exp. Edition (2005), Weinheim, Munich: Juventa Verlag
  • Müller, Wolfgang C .: How helping became a profession. A history of methods of social work . (1999), Weinheim: Beltz
  • Otto, Hans-Uwe and Hans Thiersch (eds.): Handbook of social work / social pedagogy . 2. completely reworked. and actual Ed. (2001), Neuwied: Luchterhand
  • Schilling, Johannes: Social work . (1997), Munich: Reinhardt

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter Kreft: Fashions, trends and action orientations in social work since 1945 ; (PDF; 254 kB) 2004, p. 15ff .; Retrieved September 30, 2008