Understanding needs: a challenge for ethical social work

Needs are quite a popular and widely used term in social work and social policy. Meeting people’s needs has always been an important task for social work professionals. This is also bringing the challenge to social work of... [ view full abstract ]

Needs are quite a popular and widely used term in social work and social policy. Meeting people’s needs has always been an important task for social work professionals. This is also bringing the challenge to social work of how to understand and to research the needs of people in a way to hear people’s voice during the research process as well as in the planning of responses to their everyday needs. On the examples of researching needs of older people, drug users, people with mental health problems, and women and children who were suffering from violence is explained how important is to understand people’s needs in the context of everyday life, including position of people in the society, their social and health context, types of risks they face, and the assessment of existing services. In researching the needs, the premise that needs are a socially constructed concept was followed, thus expressing them and discussing them would be the first step to people getting heard, to having a voice in planning services and for the planners to get the knowledge from people’s experiences, to come closer to users’ worlds and their immediate experiences. Ethnographic approach to research gives fascinating advantages. It gives the possibility to record events, moments and situations of needs on one hand and local legends, mythology and beliefs on which social representations of needs and everyday life are constructed on the other. It gives also the possibility to get in contact with special knowledge that a particular community/group/individual have developed and experienced. The results demonstrate that people expressed the most varieties of needs when talking about daily routines and the necessary chores of the day, while the greatest worries were conveyed about changes in the future, mostly related to conditions that maintain an independent life.