Social Work Theory & the Concept of Community

This paper is an investigation of the concept of community as it applies to social work theory. It uses the example of an 18-year-old Dominican Republic immigrant, whose recent move from the nurturing, close-knit community of her homeland to the confined and often hostile environment of a lower-class Brooklyn neighborhood provides an intriguing contrast between two types of communities. This paper uses a biopsychosocial perspective and looks at the issue using a systems theory approach to consider the topic. Because the subject is an adolescent, the environmental pressures are especially dramatic, showing some of the ways in which community has an impact on the individual, the family system, and the larger social, psychological, and political environment in which the individual lives.

Asenhat Gomez was born in a farming community in the Dominican Republic (Gonzalez, 1993, April 20, p. 2). Her hometown was a locality-based community, in which the individual social units, the Gomez family and other families living in the area, formed a social system, based principally on the needs of each unit to interact in order to achieve mutually beneficial goals (Systems Approach, p. 17). The community's boundaries were defined by the local geography and by the group's common needs and desires.

The immediate Gomez family consisted of father and mother, Vicente and Esperanza, and three children, son Harold and two daughters, Asenhat and Amalia (Gonzalez, 1993, April 20, p. 2). This

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to send some support home, thus retaining a long-distance attachment to the community in which she had grown up (Systems Approach, p. 35). Esperanza had to work for six years in America to establish legal residency and earn enough money to bring her three children to New York (Gonzalez, 1993, April 20, p. 2). The new community in which they found themselves is much more complex than the one they had left behind. The family settled in Williamsburg, an area in the northern part of Brooklyn, one of New York City's five boroughs. Their new community is much more compact, less integrated, less autonomous, and less competent, in social system terms, than Moca had been (Fellin, 1995, p. 5). While Moca had been a system within the larger suprasystem of the country of the Dominican Republic, it had often seemed to its residents like a separate entity. Williamsburg, on the other hand, has much greater interaction with its outside environment. People who live in Williamsburg often work outside its borders, often very far outside (distances which are navigable by virtue of New York's extensive public transit system). Ironically, however, the community is also much more closed than Moca had been. Because its borders include so many

Category: Psychology - S