The Strengths Model posits: People who are successful in living use their strengths to attain their aspirations and goals. Embracing this perspective, it allows the practitioner to respect the client's abilities, beliefs, values, support systems, goals, achievements and resources. This orientation in social work truly seeks to fulfill the aforementioned client qualities, yet acknowledges the existence of societal problems, family dysfunction and individual disease.
This perspective is in stark contrast to the medical model, which pathologizes or views the person as being ill, deficient or inherently weak.
The Strengths Model of Social
Work is not accredited to one researcher, but to many contributors.
They include but are not limited to Saleebey, Rapp, Weick, Kisthardt,Sullivan, Hepworth and Larsen. The Strengths Model's vision is to embrace the "heart" of the Social Work profession's perspective, ie, to look at a person's strengths. This model assists the worker and client to collaborate in all phases of the therapeutic alliance. This has proven to be an empirically effective model in working with the severe and chronic mentally ill, as reported by Charles Rapp in his text, The Strenghts Model.
The University of Kansas has 15 years research with the Strengths Model. There is a link included on this webpage.
