Assignment 3: Spring Term Paper—Two Options (7-12 pages, due week 12)
Option 1: Analyzing and Identifying Steps Forward in a Clinical Case Study
Please select a case (an individual, family, or group) from your current fieldwork that is clinically challenging or where you are encountering an impasse. This should be a new case, rather than one you wrote about in the first semester. Please discuss the following:
1. Please provide a very brief introduction to the case, including where and how you are meeting with the client or group, the presenting concerns, and relevant bio/psycho/social/spiritual data and history.
2. Describe in detail a primary challenge or impasse associated with your clinical work in this case. Regardless of the problem, identify how it is manifesting at a process level and provide a few direct exchanges from a process recording within this section to demonstrate what you mean. If relevant, you may also choose to discuss how it is manifesting at a meso level.
3. Consider issues pertinent to the case and potentially relevant to the challenge or impasse you are facing, including the following: ethical challenges; dynamics of social identity and power, privilege, and oppression; social, economic, and environmental justice issues; the application of research to practice and practice to research; policy issues; engagement, assessment, and intervention; and evaluation of practice.
4. Provide a clinical conceptualization (using one theoretical framework) for the specific problem you have identified. This means using a theory (e.g. attachment theory, ego psychology, trauma theory, CBT, DBT) that helps you to consider the causes and contexts of the problem you have identified. Consider psychological and socio-political factors (historical and present) which may be important for understanding the problem. Remember that at this point you are using the theory to conceptualize/understand the presenting problem, not to guide your approach or technique with the client.
5. Discuss transference and countertransference dynamics as they bear on the clinical challenge being addressed. Whether integrated within your focus on transference and countertransference or discussed separately, please examine how dynamics of power, oppression, and identity/social location (yours, your client’s, your colleagues’, others involved) may relate to the case conceptualization and treatment. Here and elsewhere, please only share what is comfortable. If relevant, discuss how the agency setting is implicated in the transference and countertransference.
6. Please discuss the challenge or impasse in conversation with 2 or 3 readings from the semester that help to deepen, open up, or complicate your thinking about this issue. You may also choose to consult additional sources using one or more of the databases in Tripod’s Social Work Research Guide (https://guides.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/social-work)
to identify articles (either theoretical or empirical) relevant to your concern. We strongly recommend using both PEP-Web and PsychInfo, but others accessible through the Research Guide may be useful for gathering literature relevant to some of your questions, too.
7. Drawing on your discussion of the literature and the case, consider how your understanding of the problem might guide attempts to address it. In other words, based on your analysis in this paper, what should your next steps be with your client? Is there something you can actually do that makes sense given your analysis of the problem?
The paper should be in the range of 7-12 double-spaced pages using a 12 point, Times New Roman font.
Please use APA formatting and clear headings/ subheadings to organize your paper.
