Social Work with Groups: Enhancing Social Skills

For social work (SW) groups, the research object is the group dimension as an area in which to observe and experience the basic dimensions of social life. The analysis of groups as a research area has highlighted the social roles that primary and secondary groups enforce, and how, through the group experience, skills necessary for social life are internalized, from communication skills to the management of teamwork and leadership. Once these capabilities are discussed, techniques are designed for people to recover in difficult circumstances through social interaction. In this sense, SW groups can be defined as that specialty within SW which aims to recover and strengthen, through group interaction and group activities, the social skills of citizens, to increase and improve their personal enrichment and social functioning. Thus, the starting point for addressing this subject is the analysis of social and group life.

Research on social groups shows the bases that make possible our very existence as such: civilization. To stay in turn, you must preserve at least some of the characteristics of the group. SW with groups is a scientific discipline that lies within the social sciences, whose object of study can be divided into three areas:

• The analysis of the basic functions that the group plays in social life.
• The analysis of the challenges for social inclusion arising from living conditions in contemporary societies.
• The development and application of specific group dynamics that reinforce the possibilities of inclusion of those in difficult situations.

Since we internalize a set of behaviors and modes of interpretation through a long process of socialization, groups play a key role. It is precisely by working with groups that we can intervene to bolster a precarious situation in which a citizen is found.

The Social Question and the Birth of Scientific Discipline as Social Work

SW groups are characterized by a specified complexity because of the special relationship that exists between the object and subject of study. Any approach to SW groups must take into account the particular situation resulting from the human condition as subject and object of study. The search for objectivity should be based on the status of the researcher, which affects the possibility of building value-free scientific knowledge. At the same time, the researcher's familiarity with the social world, because it is part of it, is the epistemological obstacle *par excellence* for the systematization of continuously produced fictitious conceptions, while their terms of credibility.

Moreover, the peculiarity of their subject study poses methodological challenges that require the development of concepts and appropriate analysis techniques. The explanation of SW itself with groups in scientific explanation must adapt to the characteristics of the object, so it cannot be content with a mere projection of models. Naive or self-centered explanations of mythical-magical models, developed to analyze interrelations of inert nature, are not adjustable without the investigation of human social interactions. We can differentiate a triple role in the scientific explanation of SW groups:

• The analysis of its subject.
• The release of inadequate analysis models.
• The generation of new concepts and models that refer to both the group dimension of life and the techniques to develop for, using group dynamics to promote the improvement of social skills needed to cope with the challenges of advanced societies in which we operate.

This process of liberation is a historical process that takes time, and whose main difficulty is the peculiar division of social standards of our way of thinking and perceiving, in the field of natural sciences and in the field of social life. The context in which SW groups were born as a scientific discipline is characterized by the confluence of four events:

• The **Industrial Revolution** (inseparable from the scientific revolution, both are part of a new mentality characterized by a utilitarian perspective, the idea of progress, and the use of the scientific method as a means of analyzing reality and a basic element for processing).
• The **Enlightenment** (which established scientific reason as a method of analysis of reality).
• The **political revolutions**.
• The **scientific revolution** and the emergence of the **"social question"** which foregrounds the need to devise an organized social action.