7.1 Chapter Overview
In Chapter 2, we introduced the idea of professional ethics and how internships require students to take on the responsibilities of a professional human service worker. The internship involves working with other people who are being offered a service of one type or another, so ethical principles and practices must be a focus of the experience. It is your responsibility as a human services intern to uphold them in everything you do and say. This chapter will focus on the ethical decisions and dilemmas that interns often face when first working in the field.
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
- Illustrate connections between professional ethics and day-to-day practice.
- Describe common ethical dilemmas seen in fieldwork settings.
- Create a plan to address ethical challenges as they arise.
Preview of Key Terms
- Boundaries: the ability to determine our own safe zones to our emotions. Keeping separate needs, desires, thoughts, and feelings from those of others. In the human services context, boundaries most often refer to keeping our needs and wants separate from those of our clients.
- Code of ethics: the collection of behavior standards adopted by a profession or agency
- Confidentiality: spoken, written, and behavioral communication practices designed to provide and maintain an individual’s or group’s privacy. Includes licensing and HIPPA requirements.
- Dual relationships: a relationship between a human services worker and another person or group that involves a conflict of interest. Common examples include dating a client or using a client for the clinician’s own personal or financial gain.
- Ethics: Ethics are a code of morals or a philosophy that guides an individual’s behaviors and actions. Ethics also include a set of standards or code of conduct set forth by a company or profession.
- Ethical dilemmas: situations in which you are faced with unclear choices about how to handle a situation with a client. This may be a difference between your ethical guidelines and another’s, a conflict between your personal and professional ethics, or a clash between two competing ethical standards.
Chapter Overview Licenses and Attributions
“Chapter Overview” by Ivan Mancinelli-Franconi PhD and Yvonne M. Smith LCSW is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Ethics are a code of morals or a philosophy that guides an individual’s behaviors and actions. Ethics also include a set of standards or code of conduct set forth by a company or profession.
A credit class in which students apply theory to practice by using what you have learned in coursework in a real-world setting with a supervisor/mentor who is invested in your growth and development (often also referred to as fieldwork or practicum).
situations in which you are faced with unclear choices about how to handle a situation with a client. This may be a difference between your ethical guidelines and another’s, a conflict between your personal and professional ethics, or a clash between two competing ethical standards.
(or internship/practicum) experiential learning contained within human services programs. For the purposes of this text, fieldwork, internship, and practicum will be used interchangeably.