Some Aspects of Relief in Family Casework An Evaluation of Practice Based on a Study Made for The Charity Organization Society of New York. By Grace F. Marcus. Copyright 1929 by  The Charity Organization Society of New York.

As the title suggests, the contents of the book concern themselves with an evaluation of relief casework as conducted by the Charity Organization Society up to . Questions involved in such processes are numerous, needing careful sifting to bring forward such only, which when answered, can be of benefit to future work.

Good insight into the problems involved is evidenced by the author in her own introduction, which follows, quoted in full:

“The following pages attempt to present an evaluation of a group of family casework records. The evaluation is inconclusive. If casework were a trade dealing only with concrete materials that could be classified and graded, using only standardized tools in ways that could be fully prescribed, an evaluation of its methods and its products might be expressed in terms downright and final. That which is essential in casework, however, perversely evades measurement. Its problems are problems of human experience. Its products are states of being. Its material is a human nature that is incalculably diversified, mutable, and complex, in conflict with itself and circumstance. The goals of casework cannot be fixed ends of constant, definite character. They are merely relative concepts of social adequacy which differ in every application and change for each practitioner with each new inch of progress.

“A popular evaluation of casework might be concerned with provinces already conquered. A professional evaluation is by its very nature preoccupied with the problems of a vague and ragged frontier. In casework, as in the professions and sciences to which it is related, this is the professional price we pay for progress—a consciousness that each problem solved merely reveals knottier problems still to solve. One reward of experience is a sharper perception of what we have misunderstood or overlooked. There is no visible boundary where we can call a halt. There is no assured terminal point ahead by which the road already travelled can be measured.

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