A major frustration I’ve encountered lately is the idea that searching for the strengths of a community, organization, family, or individual skews things. No pun intended, but I strongly disagree. I believe that not adopting a strengths-based approach misrepresents things more than searching for strengths ever would.

So, What is a Strengths-Based Approach?

The strengths-based approach is commonly taught in social work to combat the pathologizing of clients that can naturally occur in a helping profession. In other words, when people come to you with their problems, it can be easier to see the deficits rather than the assets. To provide a fuller definition:

"The strengths-based perspective demands a different way of looking at individuals, families, and communities. All must be seen in the light of their capacities, talents, competencies, possibilities, visions, values, and hopes, however dashed and distorted these may have become through circumstance, oppression, and trauma. The strengths approach requires an accounting of what people know and waht they can do, however inchoate that may sometimes seem. It requires composing a roster of resources existing within and around the individual, family, or community (Saleeby, 1996, p. 297).”

Although the definition above may be seen as pathologizing itself with its “…however dashed and distorted these may have become…” it paints a fairly clear picture of what the strengths-based approach entails.

Strengthened or Skewed?

It may be difficult to imagine a situation in which someone wouldn’t approve of a strengths-based approach, but I took part in two debates about this topic in the past week alone. Here’s one example.

I had a group project in which we assessed a community. While reviewing our slideshow before the presentation, I noticed that bullets with sentiments such as, “lack of reliable transportation; lack of well-paid jobs that are local; boarded up hospital; high drop-out risk” decked the slides (some of these bullets were my own).

I approached my group asking if anyone else was concerned about things coming across as overly negative*. The response I got was that it can’t be negative, because these are facts. This is a common response I’ve encountered when discussing the importance of finding and presenting client strengths.

I have heard from well-intended people in my life that if you have to search for strengths, you are skewing the picture. I strongly disagree with this sentiment, and there are several reasons why. A strengths-based approach lessens the degree to which practitioners pathologize clients, it encourages clinicians to examine their implicit biases that impact the way they work with clients, and it combats the assumption that facts are neutral, indisputable, unpoliticized truths.

Press Pause on Pathologizing

As mentioned before, social workers are helping professionals. By nature of the work we do, problems are always a major focus. People don’t come to us saying, “Here are all my strengths!” They come to us with their struggles. It’s up to us as social workers to be on the lookout for strengths that have faded into the background for clients.

For example, all clients, excluding some involuntary clients, are seeking help. That shows an awareness of the problem and a willingness to work on it – these are strengths! But a practitioner who approaches the client without a strengths-based approach may only see the problem. This means the solutions they come up with won’t draw on the client’s strengths, or at least not intentionally. As a result, the client may not be able to accomplish the goals necessary to achieve the solution, or the client may not be invested in those particular goals. The client also may continue to see themselves as helpless and unable to address future problems without the help of a clinician, which is the biggest detriment of all. All clinicians or therapists should strive to be fired by clients whose self-efficacy has grown beyond the perceived need of a practitioner’s assistance.

Examining Implicit Bias

Humans value strengths we’ve personally experienced and devalue the strengths of others’, and even sometimes see them as weaknesses. This is particularly true in the United States, in which the dominant culture’s norms and values are routinely seen as generalizable to society at-large (Robbins, Chatterjee, Canda, & Libowitz, 2019). This impacts research and practice approaches alike.

“The deficiency formulations that are a result of such research and theory introduce a systemic bias into the description of minority individuals and families.” (Robbins, et al., 2019, p. 156)

Adopting a strengths-based approach when working with those who are not members of the majority culture allows clinicians to set their bias aside by being tuned in to strengths that are not readily apparent in an Anglo-centric, problem-focused approach. Therefore, deficiency formulations, or views of clients from different backgrounds than the practitioner’s as “less-than”, are less likely to emerge.

The Thing about Facts…

I’ve encountered stereotypes about social workers that they’re all rainbows and butterflies; that they’re not living in reality; that they’re soft. I’ve sensed this attitude when discussing a strengths-based perspective, particularly when it comes to addressing the presentation of facts.  

In social work, it is hammered into us that context is everything, and facts are not exempt. There is a heavy emphasis on backing up your assertions and practices with research in social work (engaging in evidence-based practice or EBP). However, as many professors at my school note, research used to inform EBP is conducted overwhelmingly by cisgender, older, white men of means. In addition, much of the research done has been on white men.

When context is taken into account, it’s easy to see how facts can become skewed. I am not knocking the use of research in working with clients, which is a critically important factor. The point I’m trying to make is that facts come from people who have biases and their own ideas about what strengths and weaknesses look like. My view is that very few “facts” in social science are free from bias.

Even when it comes to something seemingly objective such as drop-out rates or standardized testing scores, the measures of success and failure in school systems must be taken into account, as well as the way schools are funded, and unequal treatment of students of different backgrounds in educational settings. Without examining the fact of a school’s high drop-out rate in the larger context of the school’s neighborhood, systemic racism, and standardized testing at-large, the school or students may be inappropriately pathologized or seen as deficient, when it could easily be argued that their survival within this system give shows strengths of a different kind.

We’re Stronger Together

I would love to hear others’ thoughts on the strengths-based perspective. Please feel free to comment below with arguments you’ve encountered for and against a strengths-based approach, your experiences and insights using a strengths-based approach, what I got wrong in this blog, or anything else for that matter! You can also reach me via the contact form at the top of the page.

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References

Robbins, S. P., Chatterjee, P., Canda, E. R. & Leibowitz, G. S. (2019). Contemporary human behavior theory: A critical perspective for social work practice 4 th ed.) New York: Pearson.

Saleebey, D. (1996). The strengths perspective in social work practice: extensions and cautions. Social Work, 41(3), 296–305. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mnh&AN=8936085&site=ehost-live

* This was probably not the best wording. If I could go back, I would say as “only presenting the negative,” but this was a group text and I didn’t think it all the way through, as I now wish I would have.