Chapter one of the course textbook discusses what makes the human service field distinct from other fields, such as social work and counseling psychology. For the first part of your th

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Educational Requirements and Professional Standards for the Helping Professions

The human services field is generalist and interdisciplinary in nature, and thus includes different professions with varying functions, levels of education, and requirements for state licensure. Understanding the specific requirements for the various careers within the broader human services profession helps human services students better understand the requirements for their careers of interest.

Human Services Educational Standards

The Council for Standards in Human Service Education (CSHSE) was established in 1979 for the purposes of ensuring excellence in human services education at the associate, baccalaureate, and master’s levels, through the guidance and direction of educational programs offering degrees specifically in human services. The CSHSE developed a set of research-based national standards for curriculum and subject area competencies for human services education degree programs at colleges and universities and provides guidance and oversight to educational programs during the accreditation process.

The CSHSE requires that the curriculum in a human services program cover the following standard content areas: knowledge of the human services field through the understanding of relevant theory, skills, and values of the profession, within the context of the history of the profession; the interaction of human systems; the range and scope of human services delivery systems; information literacy; common program planning and evaluation methods; appropriate client interventions and strategies; the development of students’ skills in interpersonal communication; client-related values and attitudes; and students’ self-development.

The curriculum must also meet the minimum requirements for field experience in a human services agency, as well as illustrate that students are receiving appropriate supervision within their field placement sites (CSHSE, 2019). The CSHSE is the only organization that accredits human services educational programs and also offers continuing education opportunities for human services professionals and educators, networking opportunities, an informational website, and various professional publications.

Human Services Professional Certification

In 2010, the CSHSE and the NOHS in collaboration with the Center for Credentialing & Education (CCE) took a significant step toward the continuing professionalization of the human services profession by developing a voluntary professional certification called the Human Services Board Certified Practitioner (HS-BCP). Human services professionals who hold at least an associate degree in human services (or related field) from a regionally accredited college or university and have 350 hours of post-graduate work in the human services field may be qualified to take the HS-BCP exam (pending an evaluation by the CCE).

The implementation of the HS-BCP certification has moved both the discipline and the profession of human services toward increased professional identity and recognition within the broader helping professional fields by verifying human services practitioners’ attainment of relevant education and practice knowledge. Credentials are maintained through a recertification process that requires 60 hours of continuing education every 5 years, including 6 hours of ethics (CCE, n.d.).

Duties and Functions of a Human Services Professional

The NOHS, as the primary professional organization for human services students, educators, and practitioners, provides a range of benefits to members, including opportunities for professional development as well as networking, advocacy of a human services agenda, and the promotion of professional and organizational identity. The NOHS has also been influential in developing the scope and parameters of human services professional functions and competencies, some of which include the following:

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· Understanding the nature of human systems, including individuals, groups, organizations, communities, and society, and how each system interacts with others.

·  Understanding conditions that promote or limit optimal functioning of human systems.

·  Selecting, implementing, and evaluating intervention strategies that promote growth and optimal functioning, and that are consistent with the values of the practitioner, client, agency, and human services profession.

·  Developing process skills that enable human services professionals to plan and implement services, including the development of verbal and oral communication skills, interpersonal relationship skills, self-discipline, and time management skills.

The reason why these competencies are so important is because in the human services profession the human services practitioner is the primary tool used to effect change in people’s lives. Thus, to be effective, they must develop a comprehensive and generalist skill set that enables them to work with a wide range of clients, with diverse backgrounds, many of whom are experiencing a wide range of challenges, within varying contexts. For instance, imagine that you have a 40-year-old White mother of two young girls as a client. She has recently left a violent relationship and is currently residing in a transitional housing shelter. Now imagine that you have another client who is a 75-year-old Black veteran with an alcohol addiction who is grieving the recent death of his wife. And finally, imagine that you have a client who is a young Native American teen who was living in foster care and recently ran away from home and is now living on the streets, hasn’t attended school in weeks, and is refusing to return home.

Each of these cases will require that you develop the ability to understand and assess these clients through the lenses of their generational cohort, gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, the systems within which each client is operating (e.g., educational, legal, family, vocational), and how each system interacts with the others. You will also need to develop an understanding of and ability to assess conditions that support or limit functioning, such as histories of trauma and abuse, mental and physical health status, educational and employment backgrounds, prior losses, coping styles, and available resources. You will need to become familiar with a range of intervention strategies, including the ability to evaluate what interventions would be appropriate for each client, and then learn how to engage in an ongoing evaluation of the selected interventions’ effectiveness.

Finally, you will need some additional skills to pull all this off, such as good interpersonal skills that enable you to connect with clients who are likely very different from you, who may be resistant to change, or who are emotionally guarded. You will also need to have excellent writing skills so you can succinctly write process notes and enter them on your agency’s electronic records system using your excellent technical skills. Whew! If you can accomplish all of this, you’ll be a true generalist human services professional!

Of course, you won’t be flying by the seat of your pants and making things up as you go. Rather, you will have access to a set of guiding principles, also called theoretical orientations, to guide your decision making and interactions with clients and client systems. The human services discipline is built on theoretical foundations that reflect the values of the profession. Understanding the underlying assumptions of any theoretical framework is important because such assumptions guide practice decisions about the people we work with and society as a whole. For instance, theoretical orientations and frameworks (also called theoretical models) make assumptions about human nature and what motivates people to behave in certain ways under certain conditions.

We rely on theories every day when coming to conclusions about people and events, and why people behave as they do. So if you have ever expressed an opinion about why people don’t work (they are lazy, or they don’t have sufficient opportunities), or why some people commit crimes (they are evil, or they are socialized during a bad childhood), you are espousing a theory and may not even realize it!

Theoretical Frameworks and Approaches Used in Human Services

Theoretical frameworks can serve as the foundational underpinnings of a profession, reflecting its overarching values and guiding principles (such as human services’ commitment to social justice and a belief in a person’s natural capacity for growth). They can also extend into the clinical realm by outlining the most effective ways to help people become emotionally healthy based on some presumptions about what caused them to become emotionally unhealthy in the first place. For instance, if a practitioner embraces a psychoanalytic perspective that holds to the assumption that early childhood experiences influence adult motivation to behave in certain ways, then counseling sessions will likely focus on the client’s childhood. But if the practitioner embraces a cognitive behavioral approach, which focuses on behavioral reinforcements and thinking patterns, then the focus of counseling will likely be on how the client frames and interprets their life experiences.

All of this information about theoretical frameworks and approaches raises the question of what theories tend to be used the most in the human services discipline—both as theoretical foundations (or underpinnings) for the profession, as well as those that guide practice. When considering the various theories of human behavior and social dynamics, it is important to note that theories can be either descriptive (e.g., describing a range of child behaviors), or prescriptive (e.g., determining which behaviors in children are normative and healthy, and which ones are not). A theory may begin by merely describing certain phenomena related to how people think, feel, and behave, but in time, as the theory develops, it may become more prescriptive in the sense that certain determinations are made by the theorists with regard to what is normative and healthy versus what is maladaptive.

It is also important to remember that culture and history often affect what is considered normative thinking and behavior. For instance, 100 years ago if a woman chose to remain single and not have children so she could focus on her career goals, she likely would have been considered mentally ill. A commoncriticism of the major theories of human behavior is that they are based on Western cultural values, and thus the behaviors deemed normative and healthy are often culturally prescribed and not necessarily representative or reflective of non-Western cultures. For instance, is it appropriate to apply Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of human behavior, which was developed from his work with high-society women in the Victorian era, to individuals of a Masai tribe in Kenya? What about using a Western-based theory of parenting with parents from an indigenous culture in South America?

Theories of human behavior used in the human services must reflect the values and guiding principles of the profession and also the range of human experiences, which supports the evaluation and assessment of clients in context. Important areas of context include personal characteristics, such as age, race and ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity, geographical region, health status, socioeconomic status, and religion. Context involving social characteristics is important as well, such as the economy, political culture, various laws, the educational system, the health care system, racial oppression, privilege, gender bias, and any other broader social dynamic that may have an impact (even a distant one) on an individual’s life.

The theoretical frameworks and approaches most commonly used within the human services discipline evaluate and assess clients in the context of their various personal and environmental systems, while also considering the transactional relationship between clients and their various systems. Consider this case example:

A woman in her 40s is feeling rather depressed. She spends her first counseling session describing a fear that her children will be killed. She explains how she is so afraid of bullets coming through her walls and windows that she doesn’t allow her children to watch television in the living room. She never allows her children to play outside and worries constantly when they are at school. She admits that she has not slept well in weeks, and she has difficulty feeling anything other than sadness and despair.

Would you consider this woman mentally ill? Paranoid, perhaps? Correctly assessing her mental state does not depend solely on her thinking patterns and behavior, but on the context of her thinking and behavioral patterns, including her various experiences within her environment. If this woman lived in an extremely safe, gate-guarded community where no crimes had been reported in decades, then an assessment of some form of paranoia might be appropriate. But what if she lived in a high-crime neighborhood, where “drive-by” shootings were a daily occurrence? What if you learned that her neighbor’s children were recently shot and killed while watching television in their living room? What about her economic level, the relationship between her, her neighborhood, and local law enforcement? What about the relationship between her children and their school? Her thinking and behavioral patterns do not seem as bizarre when considered within the context of the various systems in which she is operating; rather, it appears as though she is responding and adapting to her various social systems in quite adaptive ways!

Theoretical Frameworks Based on General Systems Theory

General systems theory is a foundational framework used in the human services discipline because it reflects these systemic interactions. General systems theory is based on the premise that various elements in an environment interact with one another, and that this interaction (or transaction) has an impact on all elements or components involved. This presumption has certain implications for the hard sciences such as ecology and physics, but when applied to the social environment, its implications involve the dynamic and interactive relationship between environmental elements (such as one’s family, friends, neighborhood, and gender, as well as broader social elements, such as religion, culture, one’s ethnic background, politics, and the economy) and an individual’s thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

The systems within which we operate influence not just our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, but our sense of identity as well. Consider how you might respond if someone asked you who you were. You might describe yourself as a female college student who is married, who has two high school-aged children, and who attends church on a regular basis. You might further describe yourself as an active online blogger from a second-generation Italian Catholic family who loves to run. On further questioning you might explain that your parents are older, and you have been attempting to help them find alternate housing that can assist them with their extensive medical needs. You might describe the current problems you’re having with your teenage daughter, who was recently caught with drugs by her high school’s police officer and has been referred to drug court.

Whether you realize it or not, you have shared that you are interacting with the following environmental and social systems: family, friends, neighborhood, social media, Italian American culture, Catholicism, gender, marriage, adolescence, the sports community, the medical community, the school system, and the criminal justice system. Your interactions with each of these systems is influenced by your expectations of these systems and their expectations of you. For instance, what are your expectations of your college professors? Your family? The Catholic Church? And what about what is expected of you as a college student? What is expected of you as a woman? As a wife? As a Catholic? What about the expectations of you as a married woman who is Catholic? What about the expectations of your family within the Italian American Catholic community? As you attempt to focus on your academic studies, do these various systems offer support or added pressure? If you went to counseling, would it be helpful for the practitioner to understand what it means to be a member of a large, Catholic, Italian American family? Would it be helpful for your therapist to understand what it means to be in college when married with teen daughters and aging parents?

The focus on the transactional exchanges between individuals and their social environment is what distinguishes the field of human services from other fields such as psychology and psychiatry (which tend to take a more intrinsic view of clients), although recently systems theory has gained increasing attention in these disciplines as well. Several theoretical frameworks and approaches have evolved in the last several decades that are based on general systems theory and thus capture this reciprocal relationship between individuals and their social environment and broader social systems, including Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, the ecosystems perspective, and a practice orientation called the person-in-environment approach. Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) developed the ecological systems theory, which conceptualizes an individual’s environment as four expanding spheres, each with increasing levels of interaction with the individual. The microsystem includes one’s family, the mesosystem (or mezzosystem) includes elements such as one’s neighborhood and school, the exosystem includes elements such as the government, and the macrosystem includes elements such as one’s broader culture. The primary principle of Bronfenbrenner’s theory is that individuals can best be understood when evaluated in the context of their relationships with the various systems in their lives, and understanding the nature of these reciprocal relationships will aid in understanding the individual holistically.

Similar to Bronfenbrenner’s theory is the ecosystems theory, which conceptualizes an individual’s various environmental systems as overlapping concentric circles, indicating the reciprocal exchange between a person and various environmental systems. Although there is no official recognition of varying levels of systems in ecosystems theory (from micro to macro), the basic concept is very similar to Bronfenbrenner’s theory.

The person-in-environment (PIE) approach is often used as a basic orientation in practice because it encourages practitioners to evaluate individuals within the context of their environment. Clients are evaluated on a micro level (i.e., intra- and interpersonal relationships and family dynamics) and on a macro (or societal) level (i.e., the client is a Black male youth who experiences significant cultural and racial oppression). It is important to note that these theories do not presume that individuals are necessarily aware of the various systems they operate within, even if they are actively interacting with them. In fact, effective human services professionals will help their clients increase their personal awareness of the existence of these systems and how they are currently operating within them (i.e., the nature of reciprocity). It is through this awareness that clients increase their level of empowerment within their environment and consequently in all aspects of their life.

Self-Actualization and Strengths-Based Frameworks

Other theories that can help human services professionals better understand why people behave as they do come from the positive psychology movement, which focuses on people’s strengths rather than viewing people from a pathological perspective. Abraham Maslow (1954) developed a theoretical model focusing on needs motivation, theorizing that people self-actualize naturally, but are motivated to get their most basic physiological needs met first (e.g., food and oxygen) before they are motivated to meet their higher-level needs.

According to Maslow, most people would find it difficult to focus on higher-level needs related to self-esteem if they were starving or had no place to sleep at night. Maslow’s theory suggests that thoughts of self-esteem and self-actualization quickly take a back seat to worries about mere survival. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory can assist human services professionals in recognizing a client’s need to prioritize more pressing needs over others and can also explain why clients in crisis may appear to resist attempts to help them gain insight into their situations, choosing instead to focus on more basic needs. Many people were criticized during the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic for hoarding toilet paper despite no reports of disruptions in the toilet paper supply chain, resulting in shortages lasting for months. And yet, evaluated through the lens of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory, this seemingly irrational behavior may make sense since toilet paper is a very basic need for many Americans and hoarding it may have been reflective of people’s fears that the pandemic would prohibit them

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