ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the perspectives of social role theory for culturally sensitive and gender-sensitive social work practice. Social workers were urged to use role analysis to better understand and treat marital difficulties, child-rearing issues, and workplace concerns. Practitioners should neither focus on whether to ignore or address role differences in social work practice nor on the reality that the construction of gender opposites in therapy can be dangerous. Placing an individual in a stigmatized role is understood as a means of creating social distance and justifying social control. Social workers must recognize that families exist in a larger societal, sometimes disruptive context; that conflict may coexist with equilibrium or balance-seeking activities; and that power distribution in families is unequal. Sociologists who examine how groups achieve consensus and shared values, and how social systems meet their needs and goals as well as maintain relatively harmonious functioning are called structural functionalists.
