Building Family Practice Skills: Methods, Strategies, and Tools (Marital, Couple, & Family Counseling) - Softcover

Ragg, D. Mark

3.29

7 ratings by Goodreads

9780534556860: Building Family Practice Skills: Methods, Strategies, and Tools (Marital, Couple, & Family Counseling)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0534556868 ISBN 13: 9780534556860

Publisher: Cengage Learning, 2005

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This book presents a transtheoretical 'response system framework' for understanding family practice. This framework organizes theoretical information, assessment protocols, skills, and intervention strategies into a learning structure that helps students understand myriad client situations and the intervention strategies that would be most appropriate for those specific situations. Using this over-arching structure, and focusing on two systems of response--action systems (how family members behave and interrelate) and processing systems (how family members interpret/feel)--Ragg guides readers through the five parts of the book with the goal of building holistic family intervention skills. These five parts are comprised of: 'Family thinking', or knowledge of family systems; 'Assessing families'; 'Building the Working Alliance'; 'Change-Focused Intervention'; and 'Working with Multi-Problem and High-Risk Families.'

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About the Author:

Mark Ragg holds a Ph.D. in social work and is a key faculty member at Eastern Michigan University's Department of Social Work. Prior to Eastern, Dr. Ragg worked in a Children's Mental Health agency in Canada while also providing family and marital counseling. While working in the field, Dr. Ragg developed many family- and group-centered programs. Working with issues of child abuse, neglect, trauma, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and developmental disabilities, he gained research interests in the impact of violence and abuse on children. Dr. Ragg is also author of BUILDING EFFECTIVE HELPING SKILLS.

Review:

SECTION 1: THINKING FAMILY: AN INTRODUCTION. 1. Thinking Family: Theories and Frameworks. 2. Thinking Family: Parental Functions. 3. Cultural Influences on Family Functions. SECTION 2: ASSESSING FAMILIES: AN INTRODUCTION. 4. Exploration and Data Collection with Families. 5. Structuring the Family Exploration. 6. Moving from Assessment to Treatment. SECTION 3: BUILDING THE WORKING ALLIANCE: AN INTRODUCTION. 7. Preliminary Engagement with Family Members. 8. Interactive Engagement with Family Members. 9. Positioning Families for Change. SECTION 4: CHANGE-FOCUSED INTERVENTION: AN INTRODUCTION. 10. Direct Change Strategies for Influencing Family Action Systems. 11. Direct Change Strategies for Influencing Family Processing Systems. 12. Influencing Family Members through Indirect Strategies of Change. SECTION 5: WORKING WITH HARD TO SERVE FAMILIES. 13. Working with Multi-Problem and High-Risk Families: Challenges and Promise. 14. Multi-Agency Work with Multi-Problem and High-Risk Families. 15. Support-Focused Intervention with High-Risk and Multi-Problem Families.

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