r the effectiveness of the Act in that it reduced adoption and foster care placement rates for Indian children. Thus, the Act was said to have empowered Native Americans by giving them expanded powers of tribal self-determination and this allowed for greater family preservation effects.
Commonly, empowerment as a value is a concerned with effecting changes in the families that are being served by social workers using the family preservation model. However, Leung, Cheung and Stevenson (1994) suggest that, as a value, empowerment should not be restricted solely to clients but should be considered with respect to social workers themselves.
in this regard, Leung et. al (1994) reports that existing sociological research indicates that child protective family preservation case workers need to be empowered (and here empowerment is defined in terms of expanded knowledge) to enhance their cultural competence. In other words, more knowledge of the mannerisms, beliefs, values, etc. of the various cultural backgrounds of their client families will empower caseworkers by increasing their ability to work more effectively with these client families.
As an effort to provide empowerment in
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