Conflicting Principles in Multicultural Social Work

The starting point for social work approaches to multicultural issues is the principle of respect for human diversity. But practice issues concerning multiculturism and the role of ethnicity in patterns of oppression have revealed that current interpretations and applications of the principle of respect for human diversity often result in self contradictions and conflicts with other social work principles. This paper describes three of these conflicts, and, drawing on the literature of cultural anthropology, ethnic sensitive social work, and constructivism, proposes several conceptualizations to eliminate, or manage, them. The conflicts discussed are 1) respecting the contents of all cultures versus supporting basic human rights, 2) inability to understand the needs and views of people from different cultural backgrounds versus mission to practice social work, and 3) social worker's own right to ethnic preference versus social worker's obligation to eliminate personal cultural bias and prejudice. Conceptualizations proposed to deal with these conflicts include unconditional ethnic esteem, qualified cultural equality, right to ethnic identity, and reality and limitations of multicultural competence.

Disagreement Between Friends

This study examined two social factors thought to mediate the beneficial consequences of peer conflict. One was the social relationship between the peers, namely best friend or lukewarm friend. The second was the evaluation of self and partner after performing on the task. Children performed on two tasks: one was an ethnic preference task and the second was a measure of their understanding of multiple emotions. After each, they were given fictitious information about their partner's discrepant judgements, and asked to evaluate the two performances, and then retested for changes to their judgement. The first hypothesis was that a best friend's performance would be evaluated more highly than a lukewarm friend's. The second hypothesis was that evaluation of own judgements would be lower after disagreement with a best friend than a lukewarm friend. The third hypothesis was that judgement changes would be correlated with evaluations. The three hypotheses were confirmed differentially, depending on the task. Results were discussed in terms of the link between interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict.