Introduction to Social Work Practice

Introduction to Social Work Practice orients the students to the role of the professional social worker. The first chapter delineates the differences between being a good friend and being a good clinician in terms of social/emotional factors, professionalism, and self-disclosure. The second chapter covers techniques for building a trusting working environment that is conducive to processing sensitive issues along with an overview of key therapeutic communication skills. The remaining five chapters detail an easy-to-remember five-step problem-solving model to guide the clinical process: 1. Assessment, 2. Goal, 3. Objectives, 4. Activation, 5. Termination.

Key features include:

- role-play exercises

- brief essay and response questions to build and test key communication skills

- discussion points

- glossary of terms

- diagrams and charts that graphically represent the flow of the helping process.

The workbook presumes no prior clinical experience and uses no technical psychological jargon. It teaches fundamental communication skills while emphasizing key social work values, ethics, and issues of multicultural populations and diversity throughout.

Herschel Knapp, PhD, MSSW, has more than 30 years of experience as a health care professional in a variety of domains. In addition to his clinical work as a psychotherapist, primarily in hospital set­tings, he has provided project management for innovative interventions designed to improve the quality of patient care via multisite, health science implementations. He teaches master’s and doctoral courses at Yeshiva University; he has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, California State University, Los Angeles, and California State, San Bernardino.  Dr. Knapp has served as the lead statistician on a lon­gitudinal cancer research project and managed the program evaluation metrics for a multisite, nonprofit children’s center. His clinical work includes emergency/trauma therapy in hospital settings. Dr. Knapp has developed and implemented innovative tele­health systems, using videoconferencing technology to facilitate optimal health care service delivery to remote patients and to coordinate specialty consultations among health care providers, including interventions to diagnose and treat people with HIV and hepatitis, with special outreach to the homeless. He created and implemented a nurse research mentorship program, providing research and analytic education, enabling nurses to design, implement, analyze, and publish the results of their quality improvement projects. Dr. Knapp has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed health science journals and serves as a peer-reviewer for more than 20 science journals. He is also the author of other textbooks, including Intermediate Statistics Using SPSS (2018), Introductory Statistics Using SPSS (2nd ed., 2017), Practical Statistics for Nursing Using SPSS (2017), Therapeutic Communication: Developing Professional Skills (2nd ed., 2014), and Introduction to Social Work Practice: A Practical Workbook (2010).