Person-in-Environment System

Introduction

This book has been produced by practitioners and teachers for practitioners, teachers, and students in social work and other human services professions. Practitioners will find it a useful tool for clarifying the problems presented by their clients; teachers will find it an instrument to instruct students in how the long-held construct of person-in-environment can be put into practice. The types of students likely to use this book are advanced undergraduates and graduate students beginning their study of interpersonal helping processes. The practitioners and teachers likely to use it are those who are open to new ideas and who may be looking ahead toward ways of enhancing the social work profession.

Section II illustrates the use of PIE in various practice settings. Of the seven most common fields in which social workers currently practice (family and children's services, physical health, mental health, occupational social work, aging, education, and corrections), we have had the good fortune to find practitioners in most of them using PIE. Several practitioners who had been using PIE in various practice settings were willing to write about their experience. Joanne Turnbull and Helen Cahalane explore PIE's use in outpatient mental health settings. Joe Kestnbaum and Maureen Wahl describe PIE's use in family services agencies. Elizabeth Adkins, who worked with Jim Piazzola and Olga Sarabia in testing PIE at Los Angeles County–University of Southern California Medical Center, tells us how PIE can be used in a physical health care setting by medical social workers. Paul Saxton addresses the use of PIE in employee assistance and managed care programs. Mehl Simmons applies PIE in a public welfare setting. Elizabeth Irvin and Walter Penk use PIE with mentally ill persons in recovery from addictions. The authors of the chapters in this section were asked to include brief histories of practice in their settings along with their experience in using PIE. For this reason, there is a certain amount of repetition and redundancy for the reader who studies all the practice settings. We believe most readers will focus on the chapter that pertains to their practice and so may not experience the redundancy.

We added Section III after receiving a number of reports from social workers in countries outside the United States on how they were using PIE. James Mandiberg and Kyoko Miyaoka discuss how PIE is used to teach social work skills in Japan. Karen Walsh and Richard Ramsay present a Canadian field test of PIE in a multidisciplinary mental health setting. And Kathleen O'C. Hoekstra describes her experiences introducing the ecological perspective in the Netherlands. These chapters should give the reader some perspective about how PIE translates into other cultures and political systems.

Section IV covers other matters of importance in the development and use of PIE. We have written a chapter on how PIE can be used in case management. Cathie Hanes Delewski relates her use of PIE in teaching social work students. For the reader willing to look even beyond systems and ecological models, we include an essay by Richard Ramsay on a synergistic model for conceptualizing the practice of social work. Janet Williams discusses the testing of PIE and its use in research. We also have included a chapter on how a computerized version of PIE may make the task of capturing and reporting assessment findings less tedious.

The PIE Manual, which is a separate companion piece, includes the Mini-PIE (an invaluable tool for both teaching PIE and completing client assessments), several data collection and reporting tools used in the course of PIE's development, a listing of current interventions in social work practice that can be used to complement a PIE listing, and a section on training others to use PIE.

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