| Sumario: | The article discusses the relationship between casework and different social classes. There are, indeed, differences between casework with the average low-income, poorly educated client and casework with the average middle-income, well-educated client But these are differences in specific techniques and in emphases rather than in basic casework method. Work with impoverished families involves the use of all the procedures valued in work with more advantaged groups. In addition, it requires the use of certain innovations or modifications of traditional techniques, for example, demonstration and role-playing, which have heretofore been used chiefly in work with children and with borderline or recovering schizophrenics. In trying to understand clients of low income, one must beware of the stereotype. They differ from one another fully as much as do clients in the middle class. At the same time, one must be sensitive to the effects of grinding deprivation, of poor education, of being devalued in a status-minded society, and often of growing up in a fatherless family in a neighborhood where opportunities for crime abound and opportunities for reaching the goals to which their membership in American society leads them to aspire are very, very scarce.
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