Social Support Networks: Informal Helping in the Human Services

About this book

This book offers for the first time a clear conception of what social support networks are why they are important how they are identified and sustained where they fit in an overall framework of human services and their limits and potential in selected fields of practice. Individual chapters explore: child adolescent and family services; daycare and early childhood development; divorced and stepfamilies; schools; delinquency prevention and treatment; mental health; service to the elderly; development disabilities; healthcare and health promotion; and drug treatment. The use of social support networks--extended family friends neighbors and other "informal" helpers--is an idea whose time has come in the human services field. At a time when spiraling costs and popular sentiment weigh against any major expansion of services it is apparent that a service strategy based primarily on the notion of professional helping delivered on a case-by-case basis usually in a one-to-one relationship has serious limitations. Professional response to this major work has been uniformly positive: "The editors have assembled a book of considerable importancebrilliant in both scholarship and constructionwill appeal to a broad readership"--Gerald Euster University of South Carolina. "offers a much needed balance to the focus on individual and internal dynamics which has characterized social work education for several decades."--Eleanor Reardon Tolson University of Chicago. "Social Support Networks is a valuable contributiona unique original and authoritative book...an exciting timely and definitely practice-oriented book with a strong theoretical and research base."--Anthony N. Maluccio University of Connecticut. James K. Whittaker is professor of social work at the University of Washington. A former childcare worker therapist and administrator in residential childcare he has been a consultant to governmental and voluntary childrens agencies throughout the United States. James Garbarino is Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. He was president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development Chicago Illinois from 1985 to 1994. He is the co-author of Troubled Youth Troubled Families also available from AldineTransaction.