The social role of social worker: its shaping and acting in Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective

The subject of the work is shaping and playing the social role of a social worker in the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman. The article is based on the author’s own research carried out for the purposes of the BA thesis. A qualitative method was used, namely an in-depth interview and participant observation. The aim of the article is to describe and explain how the social role of a social worker is shaped and played in the light of Erving Goffman’s dramatic concept on the basis of research carried out at the Municipal Social Welfare Center. Social workers and students of social work participated in the study. The main hypotheses adopted in this work are the assumptions that the social role of a social worker is shaped and played by participation in performances with a defined interactive order, and that each of the performances contains a defined interactive order to which certain, constant elements are subordinated. The collected data was analyzed using the Atlas.ti qualitative analysis software. The research shows that social workers shape and play their social role by preparing in the backstage and during performances on stages, which are: studies, internships and professional work both in the center and in the field.

Social communication in social work ‒ theoretical and practical aspects

The purpose of the article is to draw attention to the issues not so much as communication, but to communicate in social work, with particular emphasis on the essence of communication between individuals, listening and not hearing and perceiving rather than seeing the needs of other people. Proper intergenerational and intercultural communication, in turn, can condition understanding and empathy by capturing the interlocutor’s point of view ‒ it should be noted that the vast majority of social workers are younger than their pupils, characterized by specialized education, which may make it difficult to understand the level of abstraction of their stakeholders or beneficiaries. In the analysis completed with recommendations for social workers, both verbal and non-verbal channels were included.

Social defining of the risk behaviors is rooted in a diverse, multidimensional world of norms, values, rituals and discourses. Including social contexts of engaging in the risk behaviors and production of knowledge about them allowed us to go beyond standard cause-and-effect descriptions and examine these actions as an essential element of everyday practices and rituals of youth. The aim of this paper was to analyze the risk behaviors of youth in the framework of sociological categories of risk, reflexivity and interactional order. The paper is based on the results of the qualitative study conducted within the project “Problem Behaviors of Youth – Study in the Opole Region 2019–2020,” that attempted to capture the ways of defining and explaining the risk behaviors by the school youth, teachers and counselors. Such a sociological perspective bridges the gap in the prevention scholarship connected to insufficient attention paid to social ways of defining and meaning making connected to the risk behaviors of youth.

Image of psychosis in autobiographical literary work of mentally ill people

Both superficial and professional contact with a person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia brings with it many threads, questions and ambiguities. This is also the case with contact with the literary and poetic work of the people affected. Their work is often incomprehensible, because in its form it often does not resemble anything known, simple or familiar. Reading the products of the sick, we have a chance to get closer to the experience and to get to know psychosis, but also to get closer to the author, as to the man with a burden on the neck, but as valuable as all other people. The aim of this work is to introduce the subject of narration and autobiographical work of mentally ill people on the example of Joanne Greenberg’s novel “Life is not a fairy tale”.

In permanently introducing this new section to our periodical, we wish to call the reader’s attention to a unique approach we are consciously taking. In a desire to identify impending foci in our field, we have invited the youngest of our colleagues – MA and PhD candidates in social work – to act as our reviewers. Furthermore, considering the vast multitude of scholarly articles published annually, we have asked our students to primarily focus on this segment which is more likely to reflect the most recent findings. That said, we have not set a strict date range in the hope that our reviewers will freely discover or recover studies which might have been overlooked heretofore.

Chambon A. (2009). What Can Art Do for Social Work? “Canadian Social Work Review”, 26, 2: 217–231.
Reviewed by Ana Filipa Rodrigues

Banks S., Cai T., de Jonge E., Shears J., Shum M., Sobočan A.M., Strom K., Truell R., Úriz M.J., Weinberg M. (2020). Practising Ethically during COVID-19: Social Work Challenges and Responses. “International Social Work”, 63 (5): 569–583.
Reviewed by: Anna Szargiej

Van Leeuwen B. (2017). To the Edge of the Urban Landscape: Homelessness and the Politics of Care. “Political Theory”, 46 (4): 586–610. DOI: 10.1177/0090591716682290.
Reviewed by: Brygida Piech