Human Services

Human services is an interdisciplinary field that studies and attempts to improve human lives. In the United States, human services has been an independent academic field since the 1960s, with close links to other social service fields including psychology, counseling, and social work. The United States federal and state governments have human services departments that provide assistance and outreach to citizens suffering from a variety of problems, including poverty, homelessness, health-care issues, abuse, and addiction. Human service professionals study the factors that affect human well-being and apply knowledge from research to create social service projects.

Brief History of Human Services

Human services, as a distinct profession and field of study, emerged from the related disciplines of counseling, social work, and psychology. As an academic field, psychology can be traced back to the mid-1800s when pioneers such as Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) developed psychometrics to investigate and measure the mental and physical differences between people. This research led to intelligence testing, pioneered by French theorist Alfred Binet (1857–1911), which was an important step toward the emerging fields of counseling and, eventually, human services.

Social work, defined as efforts to address the needs of individuals requiring assistance or welfare, can be traced back to religious outreach programs but became a distinct academic field in the late 1800s. In the United States, the first collegiate course in social work was offered at Columbia University in 1898. During the Industrial Revolution, a drastic increase in manufacturing resulted in a reduction in rural employment and a rapid rise in urban populations. The social work field grew in response to the growing number of poor in American cities and towns. From social work came the field of professional counseling or vocational counseling, a profession focused on helping individuals prepare for, find, and maintain employment. Frank Parsons, who founded the nation’s first vocational assistance organization, the Vocation Bureau of Boston in 1908, is one of the most influential pioneers of the field.

The National Mental Health Act of 1946 established the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the first federal organization to organize and provide health services to the public. As these services expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, colleges and universities began offering the first educational opportunities in human services, a general administrative field in which individuals were trained to study or work in public outreach. Essentially, human services professionals are generalists who draw on the study and techniques used in counseling, social work, and psychology to facilitate outreach and social service programs.

The first association for human services in the United States, the National Organization for Human Service Education (NOHSE), was established in 1975 and later became the National Organization of Human Services (NOHS). The Council for Standards in Human Service Education (CSHSE) was formed in 1979 to help facilitate the development of human services educational programs.

Overview

Human services embraces several service models that are also used in psychology, social work, and counseling. One of the earliest models still used by modern human services workers is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, created by Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) in 1954. Maslow’s hierarchy envisions human needs as a tiered system ranging from the most basic physiological needs, including food, oxygen, and shelter, through four higher levels: safety needs, love needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. According to Maslow, individuals are unable to address deficiencies at any level until they have fulfilled the needs at the previous level. While considered somewhat outdated, Maslow’s hierarchy is still considered an important tool for understanding the relationships between the basic needs required for human fulfillment.

Another common model is the "person-in-environment," or PIE model, which envisions an individual as part of both small-scale and large-scale environments. To help an individual fulfill his or her needs and desires, a human services worker must try to understand the person’s relationship to their environment, including family dynamics, relationships to coworkers and employment institutions, and relationship to their local community and the larger society.

A related theory, known as the ecological systems theory, envisions the individual as an element in a series of overlapping fields of influence that affect the person’s life. Like the PIE model, the ecosystems theory envisions the person within the environment but also focuses on the idea of "transactional networks," which are systems such as families, workplaces, communities, and societies, where an individual interacts through the "transaction" of information and behavior. The ecosystems model helps to envision the individual’s psychosocial state as it relates to the nature and health of the individual’s relationships.

In the early twenty-first century, the human services field struggled to cope with a vast increase in the older adult population in the United States. With higher demand for human services workers, organizations such as the American Public Human Services Association have advocated for new government policies that place increased emphasis on and provide increased funding for human services efforts. Other issues facing the human services industry include the rising cost of health care, an ongoing socioeconomic crisis that affects every sector of American society. Given rising health-care costs and reduced federal funding, some human services groups have turned to microloans, social media, and alternative funding sources to promote public services. Another issue impacting the human services industry in the twenty-first century was climate change and its negative effects on communities of color and those with low incomes. People in the human services field worked to mitigate the impacts of severe weather and other issues related to climate change and environmental injustice.

In some cases, human services careers overlap significantly with social work and psychology, though there are some fields that more typically involve direct training in human services as a profession. For instance, those trained in human services can seek work as administrators, using their training in social networks and systems to aid in managing groups of professionals within a business or organization.

Many human services professionals work as counselors or outreach professionals. Among other subfields, human services professionals work in substance abuse, elder services, corrections, and child welfare fields. In each case, the human services professional uses knowledge of social and psychological dynamics to assist individuals in coping with the specific challenges they are facing, including addiction, abuse, poverty, mental health issues, disease or disability, or age-related difficulties. Human services workers provide information on programs available through state and federal organizations and help individuals develop psychological, vocational, and educational skills that can help them fulfill life goals and improve their quality of life.

Many human services workers and social workers work as caseworkers, individuals who work with a specific client to help the client overcome various types of difficulties. Caseworkers typically focus on a specific subset of the population, specializing in substance addiction, juvenile welfare, or mental health issues. Depending on the field, caseworkers may participate in training, counseling, behavioral management, and other activities with clients.

A number of colleges and universities offer associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in human services. Higher levels of education (master’s degree or PhD) are also available in some learning institutions. Individuals who pursue higher levels of education have increased potential to work as educators, helping to train human services professionals in a variety of fields, and can also participate in research helping to develop new models and methodologies for human services work.

Bibliography

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