Psychological Empowerment and Individual Family Intervention: Approach to Conceptualization and Issues for Practice

For the Ontario Ministry of Community & Social Services, restructuring involves exploiting the strengths & capabilities of clients to enable them to respond to their own needs. Empowerment in this sense is an empty term, indeed a catchphrase for state disengagement. Here, M. A. Zimmerman's (1995) conceptualization of psychological empowerment emerges from 1997 interviews with 10 new clients of the Psychosocial Center for Children & Families of Ottawa-Carleton. The mothers expressed having a feeling of control when they took concrete steps to improve their living conditions with the help of their informal network. In contrast, they felt they had little power or influence over the formal system of services. Individual family intervention, based on psychological empowerment, aims to enable clients to exercise their power to make decisions about their situation. This intervention cannot be undertaken in a vacuum, without a sociopolitical understanding of clients' reality & their collective participation in action groups. 41 References. Adapted from the source document.