SCFHS Social Worker Complete Review Guide 2026–2027

4. Kohlberg's three levels: preconventional (avoiding punishment, self-interest), conventional (law and order), postconventional (universal principles and rights).
5. Stranger anxiety appears around 8 months; separation anxiety is common from about 8 to 18 months. A hospitalised child moves through protest, despair and detachment; quiet withdrawal is a warning sign, not calm.
6. Ainsworth's styles: secure (upset at separation, soothed on return), anxious-ambivalent (clings and resists), avoidant (ignores), and disorganized (contradictory behaviour linked to abuse, neglect or severe parental depression).
7. Maslow from the base: physiological, safety, belonging and love, esteem, self-actualisation. A homeless patient needs housing and food before work on self-confidence.
8. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development: what a child does with help but not alone; Bandura's learning by observation and modelling (a child imitates the violence he sees).
9. Ageing theories: activity (keeping activities and roles raises satisfaction), disengagement (mutual withdrawal), continuity (keeping earlier life patterns). Reviewing life with acceptance signals integrity.
10. Marcia's statuses: foreclosure (commitment without exploration), moratorium (exploring, no commitment), diffusion, achievement. Elkind's personal fable ('it won't happen to me') and imaginary audience belong to adolescence.
11. NASW cultural competence needs awareness of one's own values and biases, knowledge of clients' cultures and cross-cultural skills; cultural humility adds asking the client about his culture.
12. Prejudice is a prior attitude, discrimination is the resulting behaviour, stereotyping is rigid generalisation, ethnocentrism judges other cultures by your own. Goffman's stigma is an attribute that discredits its bearer.
13. Intersectionality: overlapping identities (divorced, expatriate, disabled) multiply disadvantage. Empowerment helps people gain control of their lives; advocacy defends clients' rights.
14. Acculturation is change from continuous contact with another culture. Culture-shock phases: honeymoon, frustration or crisis, adjustment, acceptance.
15. With an interpreter: speak and look at the patient, use a qualified interpreter (not a child or relative), and use standardised translated scales, not a self-made translation. The culturagram explores the background of immigrant families.
16. Bronfenbrenner: microsystem (immediate settings like family, school), mesosystem (links between them), exosystem (settings that affect the person without his participation), macrosystem (values, policies, culture), chronosystem (timing and transitions).
17. Systems concepts: homeostasis (tendency to stay stable), equifinality (different starts, same outcome), multifinality (same start, different outcomes), negative feedback keeps balance and positive feedback amplifies deviation, closed boundaries isolate a system.
18. Pincus and Minahan's four systems: change agent, client, target, action. Germain and Gitterman: goodness of fit between needs and environmental resources, habitat (physical setting), niche (role in the community).
19. The eco-map (Hartman) shows a family's links to outside systems: a thick line is strong, dashed is weak, a line crossed by hash marks (////) is stressful. The genogram shows family structure across generations.
20. Roles: broker links clients to resources, mediator helps two disputing parties reach agreement without taking sides, advocate defends client rights, enabler builds client capacity. Instrumental support is practical help, unlike emotional support.

Common mistakes in this chapter

• ✕ Mixing the adolescent crisis (identity vs role confusion) with early adulthood (intimacy vs isolation) and midlife (generativity vs stagnation).
• ✕ Attributing animism to concrete operations; it belongs to the preoperational stage (about 2 to 7 years).
• ✕ Calling anxious-ambivalent attachment avoidant; in avoidant attachment the child ignores the parent on return.
• ✕ Confusing assimilation (giving up the original culture) with integration (keeping it while joining the new society).
• ✕ Writing 'strange customs' or 'uncooperative' in the file; this is ethnocentric, the correct step is to describe behaviour and its context.
• ✕ Using a child or relative as interpreter for sensitive topics; use a qualified interpreter and speak to the patient, not the interpreter.
• ✕ Confusing the exosystem (a setting the person is not in but that affects him, like a mother's workplace) with the mesosystem (links between his immediate settings, like home and school).
• ✕ Mixing client system and target system in Pincus and Minahan; the target system is whoever must change, not necessarily the client.