Sociology Discussion Responses Response to Post #1

I would agree completely with you that personal awareness is a crucial factor in relation to the ability of therapists and counselors to provide high-quality professional services. It is obvious that all of us are substantially the products of our external environments and experiences in life. As a result, by the time we enter the professional field, we unavoidably bring with us a personal perspective that necessarily reflects our personal experiences in life. Those aspects of personal perspective always influence the way we perceive situations, the way we relate to others, and the manner in which we understand complex interpersonal relationships.

That does not necessarily mean that any particular personal perspective will undermine our ability as professional therapists or counselors or human resource professionals to provide high-quality services to our clients. It means that one prerequisite to ensuring that our personal perspective does not compromise our ability to be objective is that we make the effort to recognize and understand the extent to which our perspectives are potentially biased. In principle, we can never achieve complete objectivity; however, we can achieve the closest functional approximation of complete objectivity by examining our potential personal biases and expectations.

Response to Post #2

I completely agree with your suggestion that having a genuine passion for your field is essential, particularly within a field that is as potentially challenging as working with homeless teenagers. It is not the type of field that one could reasonably expect to work in over the long-term or to cope with the many stressors and disappointments inherent in the field without an underlying passion and personal commitment to help the beneficiaries of your field.

Your post also highlights the fundamental importance of the concept of prevention, both in general within the framework of human services, and also in particular with respect to troubled teenagers. Specifically, in cases, the most cost-effective approach and the one that is likely to be most beneficial...

Your focus on identifying the risk factors and the underlying causes of teens running away and your focus on distinguishing those individuals and circumstances that represent high risks from those that represent lower risks is a classic example of the way that empirical research can help us prevent problems before they actually develop. I also sympathize with your characterization of social workers being undervalued and, therefore, underpaid in American society. One hopes that the more apparent it becomes that the contributions of social workers (and of other social and health service workers) are valuable to society they will begin to be compensated in a manner that is more commensurate with the actual value of their contributions.
Response to Post #3

I completely agree with your characterization of the importance of adequate healthcare and social services in the human community. However, I would not necessarily attribute the rising cost of healthcare as a universal cause of this problem, particularly in third-world communities. The rising cost of healthcare seems to be more of a causal factor in the United States than elsewhere, and that is mainly because of our continued adherence to an ineffective fee-for-services healthcare professional compensation model in conjunction with a third-party payment system that is dominated by private for-profit health insurance companies. Other developed societies that have shifted to fee-for-result healthcare compensation and the single-payor system whereby the government furnishes most of the cost of medical services have substantially reduced the cost of healthcare in comparison to the United States.

When it comes to less developed nations, I do not think the cost of healthcare is necessarily the principal cause of preventable human disease. Rather, there are more fundamental problems and inadequacies with government services (in general) and with the basic infrastructure of healthcare that prevent many people from ever obtaining medical services of any kind. Perhaps even more importantly, there are…