LMSW Diversity and Social Justice 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A social worker discovers that their agency offers fewer services to undocumented immigrant clients than to documented clients. This is an example of:
- Legally required service prioritization
- Institutional discrimination (Correct answer)
- Appropriate resource allocation
- Individual worker bias
Correct answer: Institutional discrimination
When institutional policies systematically disadvantage certain groups, this constitutes institutional discrimination regardless of individual worker intent.
Question 2: In anti-oppressive practice (AOP), the concept of 'positionality' requires social workers to:
- Always agree with clients' perspectives to avoid imposing views
- Reflect on how their own social location shapes their perceptions and power in relationships (Correct answer)
- Position themselves as experts above clients in the therapeutic relationship
- Take a position against all dominant culture values
Correct answer: Reflect on how their own social location shapes their perceptions and power in relationships
Positionality requires practitioners to critically examine how their race, gender, class, and other identities privilege or marginalize them in relation to clients.
Question 3: Which concept describes the psychological impact on marginalized individuals who internalize oppressive messages about their own group?
- External oppression
- Internalized oppression (Correct answer)
- Lateral violence
- Horizontal hostility
Correct answer: Internalized oppression
Internalized oppression occurs when members of marginalized groups accept and adopt negative societal messages about their own group as truth.
Question 4: A social worker uses a genogram with a client but only includes heterosexual family structures in the template. This omission reflects:
- Appropriate simplification of a complex tool
- Heteronormativity embedded in clinical tools (Correct answer)
- Standard genogram practice
- Client-centered customization
Correct answer: Heteronormativity embedded in clinical tools
When clinical tools assume heterosexual family structures as default, they embed heteronormativity and can alienate LGBTQ+ clients and families.
Question 5: The term 'cultural humility' differs from 'cultural competence' primarily in that cultural humility:
- Focuses on learning a fixed set of cultural facts about specific groups
- Emphasizes ongoing self-reflection, learning, and acknowledging that expertise about another's culture always rests with that person (Correct answer)
- Is a one-time training module required for licensure
- Applies only to practitioners from dominant cultural backgrounds
Correct answer: Emphasizes ongoing self-reflection, learning, and acknowledging that expertise about another's culture always rests with that person
Cultural humility, developed by Tervalon and Murray-García, stresses lifelong learning and critical self-reflection rather than achieving a static state of competence.
Question 6: An LMSW wants to advocate for affordable housing policy affecting low-income clients. This activity reflects which NASW ethical standard?
- Competence
- Integrity
- Social and political action (Correct answer)
- Confidentiality
Correct answer: Social and political action
NASW's ethical standard on Social and Political Action calls on social workers to engage in policy advocacy to expand choice and opportunity for all people.
Question 7: Which of the following best illustrates the concept of 'decolonizing' social work practice?
- Teaching clients about the history of colonialism in world history
- Centering Indigenous knowledge systems and dismantling Eurocentric practice frameworks that marginalize non-Western perspectives (Correct answer)
- Conducting practice in post-colonial countries only
- Avoiding any discussion of history in therapeutic contexts
Correct answer: Centering Indigenous knowledge systems and dismantling Eurocentric practice frameworks that marginalize non-Western perspectives
Decolonizing practice involves challenging Eurocentric assumptions built into dominant social work models and elevating Indigenous, Black, and non-Western ways of knowing and healing.
LMSW Diversity and Social Justice 5
A social worker discovers that their agency offers fewer services to undocumented immigrant clients than to documented clients.
This is an example of: