Social welfare systems and policy frameworks

Social welfare is the idea that organized activities and government agencies can assist the community is preventing, easing, or solving recognized social problems. However, there are a number of different approaches to social welfare and each concentrates on a different aspect of the issue. In general, there are three views of social welfare: residual, institutional, and developmental, but while the first two focus mainly on providing services, the third is more focused on developing the potential of the people in the community.

The residual approach is based on the idea that traditional institutions like the free market or families are the way to provide for social inequities and any additional assistance provided by the government should only encompass the basic needs of an individual. This view provides a service to individuals that can aid them in overcoming bad times but encourages change and effort on the part of the individual to alter their situation.

This is different from the institutional approach which assumes that institutional problems are the cause of individual hardship and therefore individual change is not necessary to alleviate the problem. In order to provide for the social welfare of individuals, the institutional view provides a number of services to anyone who wants to use them without any preconditions. While both the residual and institutional views provide services to individuals the main difference between the two lies in the focus of those services. The residual approach attempts to provide services to individuals when they need it while the institutional approach attempts to provide services in order to alleviate the underlying causes of the problems.

Finally the third view, called developmental, takes a long-term look at social welfare and attempts to develop social welfare institutions that make life better, improve the quality of life, and fulfill human potential. This approach does not attempt to solve any specific problem but to develop a community where problems are avoided through social institutions. This view seeks to develop a better community instead of providing services in order to alleviate problems.

The dual perspective is a structure that attempts to discuss the different social complexities which affect an individual outlook toward their community. This structure entails three main parts which centers on the individual, surrounded by their immediate family, called the nurturing system, and finally the sustaining system which surrounds all. The individual learns their values, beliefs, traditions, and customs from their family, or nurturing system, but these must somehow fit into the values, beliefs, traditions, and customs of the sustaining system. And as the sustaining system is represented by the dominant society in which the individual exists, there can sometimes be a conflict between the values of the nurturing system and those of the sustaining system.