Ethics Alive! Narrative Ethics and the Value of Storytelling
by Allan Barsky, JD, MSW, PhD
When I conduct ethics workshops with social workers around the United States, I often start with the following question:
Assume that a challenging ethical issue arises between you and a client. What strategies would you use to help you manage the issue?
The most common response is reaching out for assistance. When faced with ethical issues, social workers often speak with their supervisors, peer consultants, NASW’s ethics consultation service, attorneys, liability insurance providers, or others who can help them determine the best way to proceed. Other common responses include referring to the NASW Code of Ethics, agency policies, or regulatory laws, such as professional licensing laws or laws that regulate particular fields of practice. Some people say they use an ethical problem-solving model that they learned in their BSW/MSW programs. All of these options are valid and helpful.
One response that I have never heard is engage the client in storytelling. When I raise this possibility, people generally respond that they have never heard of storytelling as an approach to managing ethical issues. As you read this article, I hope you’ll think about ways that storytelling can be helpful, not as a substitute for other strategies, but as a method that you can use in combination with other strategies (Brody & Clark, 2014).
What Is Narrative Ethics?
Narrative ethics is an approach to exploring ethical issues by engaging people in storytelling. Narrative ethics has a similar theoretical foundation as narrative therapy in that both are based on social constructionism. According to social constructionism, there is no singular objective truth. Our identities, values, and belief systems are based on the stories that we tell about ourselves. To put narrative ethics into practice, we can use skills such as inviting storytelling, listening attentively to one another, identifying ethical lessons and moral virtues that can be derived from the stories, and working together to co-construct the next steps of the story’s plot (Barsky, 2022). Stories help us understand one another’s morals and values, including what each person deems to be ethical or unethical. We can take what we learn from one another’s stories and explore how to move the story forward in an ethical manner.
An Example of Narrative Ethics
When I refer to myself as a social worker, different people may have different interpretations of what that means. To help others understand my professional identity and value system, I can share stories about what I actually do in practice. I remember, for example, helping a particular teenager, Ashton.[1] I met Ashton in a park where he sat next to a knapsack with all his possessions. As he shared his story, I learned that he had left home eight months earlier because his parents had problems with alcohol. They were often violent while intoxicated. He eventually decided that it was better to live on his own, even if that meant living on the street. He said he used drugs to cope with feelings of depression and loneliness. He also shared that he engaged in sex trade to earn money to pay for drugs, food, and other necessities.
As a street-outreach social worker, my job was to offer help, not to judge, blame, or dictate what Ashton should do or how to lead his life. We discussed various options, including the possibility of going to a residential addictions treatment program. A residential program would offer him a safe place to stay, food to eat, and a fresh start in life. Residential treatment programs are abstinence-based, meaning that he would need to be drug free. He told me very adamantly that he did not want to stop using drugs. He felt that drugs were his only way to cope. After further discussions, we agreed to use a harm reduction approach. Rather than focusing on abstinence, we talked about ways to use drugs in a safer manner (e.g., using clean needles, injecting safely, and avoiding overdoses).
Some people might hear this story and see me as an enabler. Rather than helping the client, was I enabling him to continue to use illicit drugs? And, if he continued to use drugs, would his health and well-being continue to spiral downward? As a social worker, however, I believe in the ethical principles of service, respect for the dignity and worth of all people, and human relationships. Initially, I offered services that I thought might be most helpful. When he rejected them, I knew that I needed to start with Ashton and his wishes. I needed to work with him as a partner. I needed to take his social situation into account and try to see things from his perspective. Essentially, I needed to honor his self-determination, dignity, and worth. These principles help to define who I am as a social worker.
Relational and Situational
Narrative ethics is a relational and situational approach to ethics. Whereas some ethics approaches suggest that we should analyze ethical issues as if we are objective third parties (rational outsiders), the relational aspect of narrative ethics means that ethics decisions should be made in the context of human relationships. As a caring social worker, I am not dispassionate about the people I serve. I care about them (Wilks, 2005). I am attentive and responsive to their needs. In many courtrooms across America, we see images of Lady Justice holding the scales of justice in her hands and wearing a blindfold across her eyes. According to this story, “Justice is blind.” As a social worker, however, I don’t wear a mask over my eyes. I strive to see the whole person. I strive to be responsive to the person as a unique individual.
Whereas some ethics approaches suggest that we should apply universal rules or ethical principles, narrative ethics notes that each situation is unique (Barsky, 2019). What is good or right for one situation may not be good or right for another. If I were working with Ashton in a different context, my ethical decision making could be very different. At another stage of my social work career, I worked for the Children’s Aid Society and served clients referred from the criminal court. If Ashton had disclosed child abuse to me in this situation, I would certainly have been required by child welfare laws and my code of ethics to report Ashton to child protection services. The situation is different, however, when Ashton is living on the street and I am serving him in my street outreach role. In this capacity, I am supposed to help Ashton with basic needs, including safety and security. If I said that I was required to report his parents to child protective services and get him into foster care, he might refuse to work with me. If he refused to work with me, his health and life could be put in greater danger. My ethical responsibilities depend, in part, on the role that I am playing and the needs of my clients.
When we exchange stories and reflect on the underlying ethics, we may or may not reach agreement about the most ethical path forward. Still, listening to one another’s stories provides us with opportunities to gain empathy (Halpern, 2018). As we share stories, we can validate each other’s beliefs, values, and experiences. As we develop mutual understanding, there is greater opportunity for us to work together and resolve ethical issues in a collaborative manner.
Applications of Narrative Ethics
Storytelling is already integral to many aspects of social work practice. When we conduct psychosocial assessments, we invite clients to share their stories:
What brought you in today? When did these concerns start? How have you tried to deal with these concerns up to now? And what are your goals moving forward?
To apply narrative ethics, we may attend specifically to moral and ethical factors:
Please tell me about your family and cultural background. What were some of the stories passed down from your parents or elders? What moral lessons have you learned from these stories?
When helping clients develop goals and action plans, we can also help them build on their core values and morals:
You mentioned earlier that “family responsibility” is a core value. How can we ensure that this value fits with the work that we are doing here?
We also use narrative ethics when we ask supervisors or others for help. We do not simply ask a supervisor, “Is it okay for me to engage with a client in a dual relationship?” We share the story, providing context and allowing for a holistic analysis of the situation. In one situation, I might share that I live in a small community where everyone knows one another and it would be impossible to avoid dual relationships. In another situation, I might explain that I work at a hospice that authorizes me to provide both individual and group counseling to the same clients. Although this situation involves dual relationships, I could share stories that illuminate the rationale for my agency’s policy and the steps that we take to minimize the risks. By sharing more details of the story, we can make sure that our decisions about how to move the story forward build on the existing context.
Practicing Narrative Ethics
One way to practice narrative ethics is to begin with yourself. How do you identify as a professional (for instance, as a social worker, counselor, advocate, or community organizer)? Write down a brief story about an actual experience in this role that suggests something important regarding who you are as this professional. What does this story say about your professional identity, including what values you hold and what moral qualities are important to you? What does this story say about how you view people and how you view your role as an agent of change? We may have many different stories that shine lights on different aspects of our values and ethics. We do not assume that one story tells everything about us. However, each story may provide important insights into who we are as moral professional beings.
As social workers, we often say that it is important to have a high level of self-awareness. Without critical self-awareness, we might unintentionally impose values, ethics, and biases on our clients. By reflecting first on our own stories, we are raising awareness about our social location, our worldview, and our ethics. We are then in a better position to listen to the stories of the people we serve.
In 2021, the National Association of Social Workers (2021) added the concept of cultural humility to Standard 1.05 of the NASW Code of Ethics. Cultural humility suggests that we should treat clients as experts in their own lives. One way to put cultural humility into practice is engaging clients in storytelling, listening with an open mind and an open heart, and striving to gain a better understanding of their cultural attributes, including their values and ethics. As we work through ethical issues with our clients, we can continue the storying process, constructing a future that takes each of the relevant individual’s values, ethics, and morals into account.
References
Barsky, A. E. (2022). Essential ethics for social work practice. Oxford University Press.
Barsky, A. E. (2019). Narrative ethics in social work practice. In S. Marson and McKinney, R. (Eds.). The Routledge handbook of social work ethics and values (Chapter 8). Routledge.
Brody, H., & Clark, M. (2014). Narrative ethics: A narrative. Hastings Center Report, 44(1): S7–11.
Halpern, F. (2018). Closeness through unreliability: Sympathy, empathy, and ethics in narrative communication. Narrative, 26(2), 125-145.
National Association of Social Workers. (2021). Code of Ethics. Author.
Wilks, T. (2005). Social work and narrative ethics. British Journal of Social Work, 35, 1249–1264.
Allan Barsky, PhD, JD, MSW, is Professor of Social Work at Florida Atlantic University and author of Social Work Values and Ethics (Oxford University Press).
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of any of the organizations to which the author is affiliated, or the views of The New Social Worker magazine or White Hat Communications.
[1] To protect client privacy, this name is not the youth’s actual name.