Social Diagnosis

Social Diagnosis

Mary E. Richmond's (1917) scholarly work, Social Diagnosis, is a 511 page comprehensive approach to social work at the beginning of the 20th century. This book provided a systematic framework for social work by formulating questionnaires concerning nearly every aspect of the profession to be used at the initiation of services. The author expressed the specific intent to provide common ground for all case workers so they could "develop a knowledge and mastery of those elements" (p. 5).

While a condensed version of the book is certainly beyond the scope of this paper, a brief summary is in order. Two appendices, a bibliography and a thorough index supplement the book's twenty-eight chapters. Richmond divided the book into three parts. Part one is concerned with the history of social work investigation and discusses how workers gather the information used to decide to whom services should be dispensed, part two discusses the process of interviewing applicants, gathering information from other sources, and how to think through the information gathered in these processes to reach conclusions about client eligibility and planning. It also begins to address the philosophical basis of social work. Richmond (1917) said:

Individual differences must be reckoned with in every field of endeavor, but the theory of the wider self, though it has of course other implications, seems to lie at the base of social casework. We have seen how slowly such work has abandoned its few general classifications and tried instead to consider the whole man. Even more slowly is it realizing that the mind of man (and in a very real sense the mind is the man) can be described as the sum of his social relationships. (p. 368)

In part three, q...

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...lock grants.

Richmond (1917) repeatedly admonished caseworkers to take a holistic approach in formulating a diagnosis that would eventually lead to an intervention aimed at helping consumers to become self-reliant. Consciousness of the environment one worked in was readily evident from the encyclopedic nature of the array of questionnaires provided. This was not known at the time as an ecological approach, but it certainly had all the characteristics of such an approach. Although no one would have used the term psychotherapy to describe social work functioning at the time, behavioral objectives were obviously part of the planning process, and the author might well have embraced many of those described in modern therapy planners (Wodarski, et al., 2001) used by today's social workers. Thus, Richmond anticipated many of the issues social workers deal with to this day.