Roberta Rubin Greene

University of Texas at Austin | UT · School of Social Work

This chapter provides an overview of the anti-oppressive resilience-enhancing stress model’s methodology and its application with clients and constituencies who are facing stressful transitions or adverse critical events. The guide outlines content that informs the social worker’s use of a narrative interview in the four phases of the social work h...

This chapter describes the social worker’s role in helping patients and their families make a health care transition from hospital to home by augmenting the resilience-enhancing stress model with case management skills. A practice example of a fictitious patient receiving services from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, throug...

This chapter discusses the intergenerational transmission of resilience from a sociocultural and structural point of view. It highlights anti-oppressive intervention strategies used in the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM) that address the fact that the large-scale societal risks that may lead to environmental injustice are disproportionatel...

This chapter focuses on a child who was transitioning to kindergarten while struggling with the developmental challenges in social functioning associated with autism spectrum disorder. A developmental specialist/special education teacher and school social worker collaborated on an interdisciplinary team to ameliorate these presenting concerns. The...

This chapter provides an overview of the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM), an anti-oppressive human behavior and practice model intended to prepare social workers to serve clients and constituencies who are facing difficult life transitions, challenging environmental demands, or adverse critical events. It synthesizes four theories that con...

This chapter is the first of three chapters that explore content related to the anti-oppressive approach to social work practice embedded in the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM). It discusses the central person–environment focus, terms, and assumptions of the anti-oppressive approach, illustrating them with practice examples. Finally, the c...

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many nursing home residents across the United States experienced numerous inordinate risks. News reports of residents’ strict social isolation and multiple untimely deaths heightened people’s awareness of the crisis in nursing home care. This chapter discusses how social workers can try to ameliorate this cri...

As US society grows increasingly diverse and polarized by civil strife, there is a greater need for social workers to give attention to protective factors that contribute to a positive cultural climate. This chapter continues to address anti-oppressive social work practice strategies embodied in the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM). It offe...

This chapter discusses how social workers who practice with military personnel and their families can address issues important to sustaining resiliency. It provides tools and strategies social workers can use to explore a family’s communication and organizational patterns, belief systems that impact deployment-related stress, and maintenance of eff...

This chapter builds on previous chapters that have described the anti-oppressive social work practice approach of the resilience-enhancing stress model. It illustrates how interventions to combat societal inequities and exclusion can ameliorate clients’ and constituencies’ distress and increase their capacity to maintain resilience at multiple syst...

This chapter illustrates a contemporary postmodern narrative perspective on bereavement associated with an individual’s meaning-making, adjustment to loss, and resilient transformation. The narrative perspective of the resilience-enhancing stress model on a person’s reaction to grief and loss is discussed when a client tells and reconstructs a gran...

Resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM) narrative interviews involve social workers facilitating a cocreated client narrative, developing a plot, uncovering important themes, interpreting events, and reimaging a new and more positive story. This is accomplished through the four phases of the RESM helping process. This chapter describes these phase...

The resilience-enhancing stress model is a research-informed helping process that combines human behavior theory and social work practice skills. This chapter illustrates how research studies conducted over the past two decades served as the foundation for this model. It presents a metasynthesis of qualitative studies of diverse older adults who ov...

Social workers involved in the field of aging focus on sustaining and promoting the optimal functioning of older adults and their caregivers. This chapter summarizes key traditional concepts that support this collaborative process and augments this discussion with a description of the resilience-enhancing stress model approach to assessment and int...

This chapter describes the resilience-enhancing stress model, an approach to social work practice based on the person–environment perspective. The creation of the model required bringing together theories and practice methods that would constitute a guide to inclusive social work practice. The model is believed to be suitable for helping diverse cl...

This chapter uses the resilience-enhancing stress model to help reunite military families who have been separated by deployment. Group workshop techniques and family-centered techniques are used to engage, understand, and support soldiers, their families, and the military community as a relationship network within the context of the distinct milita...

Since the 1950s, urbanization around the globe has increased sixfold: The population living in urban areas has grown from 751 million to 4.2 billion. This chapter addresses the rise of cities and the associated community functions that need to be fulfilled to support resiliency. Practice examples illustrate how communities confront such concerns as...

This chapter discusses how to apply the resilience-enhancing stress model at a time when there is an increasing need to recognize environmental justice and the effects it can have on people’s lives. The practice example in this chapter illustrates how resilience-enhancing social workers can address the complex interface of individual, family, and c...

This chapter describes resilience-enhancing stress model assessment strategies that social workers can apply during the cocreation of a client narrative. Social workers then critically evaluate and synthesize the information to create a client assessment chart, a client risk and protection profile, and an intervention plan. A practice example and a...

US society has become increasingly diverse, and issues of power and privilege appear to have become more pervasive (Council on Social Work Education. Draft educational policy and accreditation standards. Author, 2021). These societal trends have made it even more important that social workers who follow the resilience-enhancing stress model (RESM)...

This chapter discusses the way in which the resilience-enhancing stress model addresses ecological systems, calling attention to how people interact with their natural environments. A practice example centers on a group discussion of the draining of Lake Hula in Northern Israel that occurred during the early 1950s. Older adults who lived nearby at...

In this chapter, the resilience-enhancing stress model is applied to social work practice with refugees. The chapter demonstrates practice issues that arise when migrant populations are forced to flee their homelands because of political conflict and climate change at a rate of 21.5 million a year.KeywordsPractice skillsForced migrationRefugeesFami...

This paper presents the results of a meta synthesis of 8 qualitative studies that examined resilience among 270 older adult survivors following potentially traumatic adverse events (Bonanno, 2004). The primary data involved information about survivors’ critical events during the Holocaust , the Cambodian genocide, and the discriminatory practices o...

This paper is based on the results of the second stage of a research study entitled “Living in Mandatory Palestine: Personal Narratives of the Galilee from the 1940’s to 1967” (Greene, Hantman, Seltenriech, Abbasi, & Greene, N. (in press). Forty (40) qualitative interviews were collected from diverse older adults who lived or where born in the Gali...

Social Work with the Aged and Their Families presents the functional-age model (FAM) of intergenerational treatment, an integrative theoretical framework for social workers practicing with older adults and their families. In keeping with the Council on Social Work Education’s curriculum mandate of 2015, social workers are now encouraged to use huma...

This paper presents the results of a research study entitled “Living in Mandatory Palestine: Personal Narratives of the Galilee from the 1940’s to 1967.” Forty narratives were collected: twenty from Jewish settlers and twenty from Arabs who have lived or where born in the Galilee, prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and thereafter. Th...

Human Behavior and the 5-ocial Environment (HBSE) Handbook : A Practice Approach is a compendium of theories for social work practice with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. It synthesizes the widespread knowledge base on this topic, tracing the sociohistorical evolution of its content and the accompanying role of the so...

In this article the author presents a qualitative study about resilience and healing among Cambodian survivors of the communist Khmer Rouge regime. The database of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) was used to analyze 30 stories of people who survived but lost family members during the Khmer Rouge regime. The participants acted as civil...

The purpose of this article is to examine Cuba’s social work profession through the lens of the United States’ Council on Social Work Education’s Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards. The examination, based on observations made during a research trip to Cuba, deepened our understanding of transcultural perceptions of social work, social p...

This article presents the premise that resilience rests on an ecological-systems conceptual base that explains how people adapt to stress and maintain their daily functioning. The resilience ecological-stress model presented here uses the ecological-systems perspective, commonly known as the person-environment approach, as a unifying, overarching f...

Researchers from the Templeton study, "Forgiveness, Resiliency, and Survivorship Among Holocaust Survivors," and the Transcending Trauma Project, combined efforts to examine six transcripts of interviews with survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. The researchers focused on the nature of parent-child family dynamics before, during, and after the Holocaus...

Three waves of resilience research have resulted in resilience-enhancing educational and therapeutic interventions. In the first wave of inquiry, researchers explored the traits and environmental characteristics that enabled people to overcome adversity. In the second wave, researchers investigated the processes related to stress and coping. In the...

This article uses quotations from interviews with survivors of the Nazi Holocaust to illustrate the components of the Holocaust Survivorship Model. How better to understand the Holocaust than through the words of the survivors? Their voices speak for those whose voices were stilled forever and help create a history for those who perished.

The researchers conducted a content analysis of transcripts of interviews with survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. They coded relevant passages as representing favorable or unfavorable outcomes of each of eight psychosocial crises according to Eriksonian criteria. Data also included survivors' self-assessments of their success in meeting Erikson's eig...

This article describes survivors' family dynamics before, during, and after the Nazi Holocaust. Demographics and the Danieli Typology were used to explore family dynamics among the full sample. The researcher constructed a family resilience template, synthesizing the assumptions of ecological, family systems, and risk and resilience theories about...

This article revisits the findings of an earlier study, “Holocaust Survivors: A Study in Resilience,” that appeared in the Journal of Gerontological Social Work in 2002. That study's findings were generally consistent with other research related to resilience that suggested that survivors rebuilt their lives, forming families, establishing careers,...

This article is one of the first in an issue that presents the findings of the study “Forgiveness, Resiliency, and Survivorship Among Holocaust Survivors” funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The issue includes findings from a major quantitative study of 133 survivors and a number of smaller qualitative studies of sub-samples of survivors. The...

This article presents an approach to human behavior curriculum that requires students to achieve the purpose outlined in the Council on Social Work Education's 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards to "distinguish, appraise, and integrate multiple sources of knowledge, including research-based knowledge." It emphasizes and allows for...