74 ● Emily Keddell and tony Stanley
potential for practitioners from other disciplines when they are working
with families.
The Strengths Perspective
While traditional models of assessments have tended to focus on deficit and
problem identification, the strengths perspective instead focuses on clients’
strengths and abilities. It emerged in the 1980s as a formulized set of practice
principles, in response to the pathology-laden treatments available for people
living with mental illness (Weick 1999). According to social work theorist
Saleebey (2010, 1), operating from a strengths-based perspective means that
“everything you do as a helper will be based on facilitating the discovery and
embellishment, exploration, and use of clients’ strengths and resources in the
service of helping them achieve their dreams and goals.” Not prescriptive in
the skills to be used, this perspective can assist practitioners from other social
sciences in opening up their thinking to accommodate a wider view when
they are thinking critically about clients and their situations. This is a frame-
work in which practitioners are invited to see a client’s situation as more than
a set of problems. The framework is based on a profound belief by human
service workers that people can and want to have different lives.
Social work has always considered strengths and positive aspects of
clients’ lives, particularly within the humanistic ideals on which social work
is founded. A focus on problem-solving has also been persistent. Other
writers have noted, however, that a focus on solving problems, drawing on
an individual’s own capacities, is liable to co-option by a neoliberal agenda,
one that downplays the structural aspects of a client’s often complex issues
(Gray 2011). As discussed earlier, it is too easy for the dominant risk dis-
courses to operate as the sole definer of a client’s personhood and potential.
A strengths-based perspective provides one framework by which sociologists
and other social scientists can attempt to resist the overwhelmingly negative
consequences of risk focused thinking when working with families. It can
result in practitioners sharing power more directly with families, working
together with them to assess challenges to family functioning and to identify
resources available to overcome those challenges. This approach constructs a
fairer picture of a family’s potential for adaptive growth and has the capacity
to lead to actual change and engagement.
The Signs of Safety Approach
While strengths perspectives help workers to resist risk thinking in social
work in general, one way that the perspective has developed specifically in the