Social Work: Instruments Measuring Resiliency
Submit a response to two of your colleague’s post (colleague’s post below) by discuss how youwould use the data collected by your colleague to guide the next step in the planned change process or to inform future work with clients.
Respond separately to each colleague’s post. Each post should have at least a ½ page
response. There should be a ½ page response directed to colleague 1, a ½ page response directed to colleague 2.
Be sure to reference two or more of the attached resources in each of the two responses. APA 7th ed. *Respond as if you are speaking directly to your colleagues.
Colleague 1 Post:
Reflect on your fieldwork experience, and identify a case where it would have been
beneficial to employ resiliency theory. Describe the case in 2 sentences.
An 18-year-old female that was sexually abuse by her mother boyfriend up until she was 17 years old. The 18-year-old has decided to use her pain and her story to help other teens that went through sexual abuse.
Describe the presenting problem in one concise sentence. 18-year-old was sexually abused by her mother boyfriend from the age 11 to 17 years old.
Describe an intervention you would implement to promote resiliency.
I would use the strengths-based intervention. This way the client could focus on her strengths and use strengths as motivation.
Identify an instrument from the Smith-Osborne and Whitehill Bolton’s article that would be appropriate when employing a single-subject design to evaluate how effective the intervention is in increasing the client’s level of resiliency.
The “RSCA” approach by Smith-Osborne and Whitehill Bolton is an instrument from their article that would be ideal for using a single-subject design to evaluate how effective the intervention is in enhancing the client’s level of resiliency (Prince-Embury, 2008).
Emotional reactivity, sense of mastery, and sense of relatedness are the three scales that make up the RSCA instrument. Explain why you selected the instrument.
Because the client is 18 years old and fits within the age range for RCSA sampling, I feel the RSCA instrument would be acceptable. Adolescents between the ages of 9 and 18 were sampled for the RCSA validation.
Children and teenagers’ resilience is measured in this sample. It’s also
free of charge, so Tand her support system won’t have to pay anything.
Colleague 2 Post:
Use of Resiliency TheoryIt would have been beneficial to employ resiliency theory when working with a 16 year old African American female referred to the youth shelter (my field site) for a battery charge against her mother. The youth’s mother is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety, and has been physically and emotionally abusive to this youth and her siblings.
Her presenting issue is that her mother suffers from psychiatric, substance misuse, and other behavioral health challenges that create a volatile household for her and her siblings, and the youth is seeking a solution to this ongoing concern.
Intervention
One intervention that could be useful in the aforementioned client’s case is to focus on her resources and her strengths, the resources she already has access to and that work well for her, as well as the things she does well. Further, Turner (2017) discusses keeping a “resiliency-open” (pg. 448) perspective when working with clients so that social workers do not treat clients as if their situations are hopeless.
I would ask this client open-ended questions related to times when things were good between her and mother, and what types of activities and attitudes she held during those times, similar to questioning that occurs in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (Connie, 2021).
I would utilize this line of questioning to highlight how things were not always
bad, and that there may be some things that she can do to improve her experience in the home, provided there are no safety threats present (such as physical abuse). If her support system is a strength in the household, I would ask her to consider how she can utilize them to improve her current circumstances.
Evaluation Instrument
The Resilience Scale for Children and Adolescents (RSCA) is an evaluation instrument that I believe would work well with this client and other youths in similar circumstances (SmithOsborne & Whitehill Bolton, 2013). I chose the RSCA because it is a reliable and valid instrument and is designed to assess youth between the ages of 9-18 (Smith-Osborne & Whitehill Bolton, 2013), which is the age group served at my field site.
The scale questionnaire items were relevant to this client as well as other clients in the youth shelter. The domains measuring a sense of mastery, a sense of relatedness, and emotional reactivity are domains that I believe are necessary to assess this client’s level of resilience (Smith-Osborne & Whitehill Bolton, 2013).
The domain of emotional reactivity is critical in determining how this client manages stress, and also areas where interventions and preventive measures can be taken. The instrument is also suitable for youths reading on a 3rd grade level, which is important considering that many of the youth at my field site are there due to truancy, may have poor grades, and may not be reading at their grade level (Smith-Osborne & Whitehill Bolton, 2013). The sample size for use and measurement of this instrument was large (800+), increasing the chances of its generalizability
