A Study of Psychosocial Casework with Chicanos

E VALUATING THE effectiveness ofcasework services is one of the most challenging problems facing so-cial work today. Generally, efforts to conduct such investigations have suf-fered from an absence of vigorous research methodology and have usu-ally yielded ambiguous results, ' With a few notable exceptions, little re-search exists to document the results of casework services or the effects of the varied techniques employed in casework," Despite this scarcity, the literature implies that social casework is irrel-evant and that psychosocial casework, in particular, is ineffective with Chi-cano clients, " Proponents of this view, however, have not substantiated their criticism with empirical data. Their presentations tend to be theoretical, based on subjective impressions and assumptions, or to be supported pri-marily by anecdotal evidence and unsystematic use of case material.4 Brown, however, suggested that psy-chosocial therapy can be used suc-cessfully with Chicano clients, when therapy is provided within the frame-work of the Chicano cultural system," But, Brown's discussion, like most others, is theoretically rather than empirically based. In fact, Brown rec-ognized this shortcoming by indicat-ing that a systematic study of the ef-fects of psychosocial casework with Chicanos should be conducted. To address the lack of research in this area, the authors conducted an exploratory study to evaluate empir-ically a model of short-term psycho-socially oriented casework with Chi-cano clients. Although the conceptu-alization and the application of the psychosocial casework model vary from setting to setting, the model is generally based on a flexible theoret-ical system that allows it to be used in situations that emphasize the psy-chological or the social/cultural sphere