Posted: May 16th, 2015

Case Study 1

ase Study 7.1: A Policy Disagreement with Colleagues
Case Study: When a Colleague “Defines” Policy — And You Don’t Agree

Abstracted from an unpublished paper by Linda K. Lopez, MSW in Rothman (2005) From the front lines: Student cases in social work ethics. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Three professionals standing outside an office arguing.Karen, a 20 year old single mother of two young boys, ages 3 months and 2 years, has been living in a homeless shelter with her children for three months. She is a good prospective candidate for a transitional housing program because she has a high school diploma and has completed one year of college. She presents herself as a competent young woman–alert, communicative, able to maintain eye contact when speaking–and she generally has a high level of interpersonal social functioning, all valuable skills for future employment.

There is a history of alcoholism and abuse in her family of origin. The father of her two boys was known to have gone to jail for auto theft and assault before the birth of Karen’s first baby. She has not heard from him in about six months and was not living with him prior to her homelessness. She expresses sadness that he has not seen his baby. She has also said that he “had a bad temper and had hit her a few times.”

The social worker is seeing Karen through the Emergency Service Department of the Department of Social Services (DSS). A two bedroom apartment is about to become available in the Transitional Housing Program, another service of DSS, and the social worker wants to advocate for Karen and her family. A treatment team meeting is scheduled to discuss her case. The day before the team meeting, the social worker has an appointment with Karen. During the meeting Karen confides in the worker that she has met with the father of her children “just so he could see his kids. I know we can’t be together.” When the worker tells her that this could harm her chances for transitional housing, due to his history, she asks the worker to please keep it a secret. Without answering this directly, the worker says, “I will do what I can to help you into transitional housing.”

The social worker knows that during the treatment team meeting, there will be questions about whether Karen has had any contact with the father of her children. In order to be placed in transitional housing, a client must be likely to achieve self-sufficiency, according to agency policy. The staff member in charge of the program has interpreted this to mean that the client should not be involved in “undesirable” relationships, even with the father of her children. She believes that such relationships compromise the client’s ability to become self-sufficient and that expediency, and maximum use of resources, supports her exclusion of such clients from the program. If the worker reveals Karen’s brief contact with the father, the program director will immediately exclude Karen from consideration.”

This case seems to be squarely in the lap of the social worker, who has one day to plan an approach to the ethical problem that will:

Respect Karen’s right to privacy;
Respect Karen’s right to make her own decisions regarding personal relationships;
Give Karen the optimum chance to leave the shelter and have a decent living space’;
Respect the program director’s right and responsibility to make decisions regarding criteria for transitional housing;
Respect the agency’s policy of reserving opportunities for clients who are most likely to use limited resources well;
Respect the agency’s need to demonstrate success in order to assure continuation of funding, and
Respect her own professional judgment that Karen is a good candidate for assistance.
Pretend you are the social worker in this dilemma. Create a plan to solve the ethical problem using Kenyon’s model of ethical decision making and other frameworks from this course to describe each step of the process you would use to resolve this dilemma.

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