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Westchester Community College Harold L. Drimmer Library

AC 102 Ethics in Addiction Counseling - Perkins: Your Assignment

Your Assignment

Advocating on behalf of addicted clients, and teaching them how to advocate for themselves is an important part of the counseling process. Social and political barriers to those with addiction are very real and can inhibit growth. These might include poverty, issues of racism or sexism, homophobia, or lack of access to treatment due to poor health coverage. For this assignment, you will submit an 8 - 10 page research paper regarding one population or problem area in need of advocacy, assistance, or presents with ethical issues. (For clarification, you need an APA formatted title page and reference page, but the body of the paper should be 6 -8 pages.)

 

For this project you should:

1) Identify a specific population or problem area related to addiction counseling: When selecting your topic, you should examine specific aspects or domains of that topic while seeking to explore any ethical considerations.

2) Explore and assess your personal advocacy knowledge, skills, competencies, strengths and needs, particularly in view of the population selected.

3) Discuss specific barriers you hope to help this group or individual to overcome through advocacy.

4) Discuss your perspective on what advocacy efforts might benefit this situation or population.

5) Describe your advocacy/ethical issue project. NOTE: You may use the T.R.A.I.N.E.R. Advocacy Model to help guide your work. The T.R.A.I.N.E.R. model is a method of responding to the advocacy needs of clients and communities, as well as the profession, through the provision or coordination of specialized instruction (Hof, et al., 2009, p. 18). Consider the 6 dimensions of personal activism. Provide suggestions for other counselors and other addiction professionals and how they might advocate in their communities, agencies or schools.

 

 

First you will choose a topic in groups. You will each do your own work but coordinate your work with one another - so that each person in the topic group is presenting a different article and hopefully a different aspect of point of view on the topic.

• The three articles must be from peer-reviewed, professional journal relevant to counselor ethics in addiction counseling. less than 15 years old.

• The college library databases are available anywhere.

• Newspapers, popular magazines and .com sources are not peer-reviewed professional sources.

 

Once we have identified your group and select a topic, you can begin the following: See Assignments or Calendar for due dates.

1) Annotated Bibliography *see the Annotated Bibliography tab for more info

a. Submit on bright space (docx) the following information for your three – four articles. Author(s), article title, Journal, volume, issue, publication dates and a description for each (APA Format).

b. Do not submit the articles or a link to the articles.

2) We will review the following articles in subsequent classes. You will be provided feedback and instructed to move on with your assignment.

 

This project is intended to assist you in educating yourself and others about the ethical codes and/or legal standards at the federal or state level. Each Group will craft a 6 - 8 page project providing an overview of their topic using ethical and legal standards for addiction counselors and/or other pro-fessionals, paying particular attention to the ethical codes (e.g., APA, ACA, NAADAC, etc.) state and federal laws and regulations (e.g., HIPPA), and/or accreditation standards and/or place of pro-fessional practice (e.g., hospital, community mental health center, public school, outpatient clinic, and so forth). Legal issues (state or federal) important to the profession and/or work site should be integrated into your project. Additionally, your paper can include (highly suggested) a case study example—either fictional or based on personal or professional experience (DO NOT REVEAL IDENTIFIABLE DATA OR CHARACTERISTICS). * See the box to the right on this page about how to include this information in your paper. You are required to use APA format, and you must cite and reference a minimum of five sources, which can include the course textbook, and all sources must be from academic textbooks, referred journals, WCC library databases or profes-sionally recognized website. The use of Wikipedia and similar resources are not acceptable.

  You will find a list of databases that are recommended to find research articles for this assignment under the Find Peer-Reviewed Articles tab.

 See the full assignment details in your course shell in BrightSpace for more information and due dates on each part of this assignment.

Potential topics

  • Addiction issues for abused or pregnant women
  • Adolescent substance abusers in the public schools
  • Substance abuse treatment for the uninsured
  • Immigrant addiction issues
  • Mandated clients
  • Counselor personal life and wellness (whether in recovery or not)
  • Dual relationships and other boundary issues
  • Blood, urine, breath and other biochemical testing of client and staff.

You may select other topics, but they must be approved

TRAINER advocacy model

T.R.A.I.N.E.R is an acronym for a 7-step collaborative process to

  1. Target advocacy needs of an underrepresented client group and their associated professional advocacy requirements,
  2. Respond to the targeted needs by determining which social and/or professional advocacy competencies need to be implemented to address those needs.
  3. Articulate a plan to accomplish both social and professional advocacy.
  4. Implement the plan.
  5. Network for advocacy during the training.
  6. Evaluate the training.
  7. Retarget to address unmet social and/or professional advocacy needs.

The T.R.A.I.N.E.R. model is a method of responding to the advocacy needs of clients and communities, as well as the profession, through the provision or coordination of specialized instruction

6 Dimensions of personal activism

Consider the 6 dimensions of personal activism:

  1. System: Am I inside or outside of the affected system?
  2. Social group: Am I a part of the privileged or the oppressed group?
  3. Style: Will I intervene indirectly or confront directly?
  4. Self-view: Do I see myself as personally effective or ineffective?
  5. Information: Do I know a lot or a little? How accurate is what I know?
  6. Consequence: Will the personal and organizational consequence of the action be major or minor?

Citing first hand information / research subjects in your paper

APA requires you to obtain consent before including participants information in your paper. You may need to use aliases and obscure other details to protect the privacy of your subjects.

See Section 8.36 of the Publication Manual of the APA for more information on the ethical use of personal information"

"Quotations from participants are treated differently than quotations from published works." These sources are not given an in-text citation (e.g. personal communication), nor added to References page, but only referred to in the narrative of the paper.

 

Use identifiers other than real names, such as

  • their roles
  • pseudonyms or nicknames
  • initials
  • descriptive phrases
  • case numbers
  • letters of the alphabet

e.g.:

  • A biology major
  • Participant 3
  • Patient 4
  • “Karen,” a 35-year-old stay at home mom 
  • Q

 

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