SSW Family Systems 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which of the following BEST describes the concept of 'family resilience' in a school social work context?
- A family's ability to avoid all stress and adversity
- The capacity of a family to rebound and adapt positively from adversity (Correct answer)
- Individual coping skills that family members develop independently
- A family's compliance with school-mandated interventions
Correct answer: The capacity of a family to rebound and adapt positively from adversity
Family resilience (Walsh) refers to the family's collective ability to withstand, adapt to, and grow from challenges, leveraging shared strengths and resources.
Question 2: A school social worker is meeting with a family from a collectivist culture where extended family has significant decision-making authority. The MOST culturally responsive approach is to:
- Insist nuclear family parents make all decisions independently
- Include relevant extended family members in assessment and planning (Correct answer)
- Refer the case to a same-culture worker only
- Educate the family about individualist Western family norms
Correct answer: Include relevant extended family members in assessment and planning
Culturally responsive practice recognizes that family boundaries and decision-making vary across cultures, and extended family may be appropriately central to the system.
Question 3: Which of the following is a KEY principle of systems theory as applied to families?
- The whole is equal to the sum of its parts
- A change in one family member affects all other members (Correct answer)
- Individual pathology causes all family dysfunction
- Family problems are best understood in isolation
Correct answer: A change in one family member affects all other members
A foundational systems principle is that family members are interdependent — a change in one part of the system reverberates throughout the entire system.
Question 4: A school social worker is working with a family where the father has recently lost his job. The family is struggling to adjust. This is BEST understood as:
- A normative family lifecycle transition requiring no intervention
- A horizontal stressor disrupting family equilibrium (Correct answer)
- Evidence of poor differentiation in the marital subsystem
- A vertical stressor passed down from prior generations
Correct answer: A horizontal stressor disrupting family equilibrium
Horizontal stressors (Carter & McGoldrick) are unexpected events — like job loss — that disrupt current family functioning, as opposed to vertical stressors passed down through generations.
Question 5: In solution-focused brief therapy with families, the 'miracle question' is used to:
- Help the family identify exceptions to the problem when it does not occur
- Encourage the family to visualize a future where the problem is solved (Correct answer)
- Assign a paradoxical task to challenge family resistance
- Trace the historical origins of the family's presenting problem
Correct answer: Encourage the family to visualize a future where the problem is solved
The miracle question invites the family to imagine how life would look if the problem disappeared overnight, helping to clarify goals and preferred futures.
Question 6: A school social worker identifies that two siblings have formed a coalition against a stepparent, and the biological parent supports the children. This represents:
- A detouring coalition
- A stable cross-generational coalition (Correct answer)
- Appropriate sibling differentiation
- A disengaged family structure
Correct answer: A stable cross-generational coalition
A stable cross-generational coalition (Minuchin) occurs when a parent consistently aligns with children against the other parent, undermining parental hierarchy.
Question 7: When a school social worker involves the entire family in developing an intervention plan for a student's school refusal, this reflects which systems principle?
- Equifinality
- Subsystem autonomy
- Reciprocal determinism within the family context (Correct answer)
- Differentiation of the identified patient
Correct answer: Reciprocal determinism within the family context
Reciprocal determinism recognizes that the student's behavior and the family environment mutually influence each other, so intervention must address the system, not just the individual.
SSW Family Systems 5
Which of the following BEST describes the concept of 'family resilience' in a school social work context?