SW 497 Culture, Illness and Coping
This course is designed to advance MSW students' knowledge, awareness, and clinical practice skills to provide culturally appropriate social work services. Based on its widely used person-in-environment framework, the social work profession requires practitioners to recognize the importance of culture when making assessments, diagnoses, and interventions. By drawing knowledge and insights from various disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry, students in this course will analyze the role of culture in the definition of illness and coping behaviors of diverse client groups. Especially, this course will introduce Kleinman's explanatory model of illness and the Cultural Formulation Interview recommended by American Psychiatric Association to enhance the clinical insights of MSW students. While applying these practice models to a number of case examples, students in this class will promote their clinical skills in understanding illness and coping behaviors of clients from diverse cultures. Such clinical exercises will boost the ability of MSW students to assist their clients in meeting their needs in culturally appropriate ways.
Prerequisite
None