Thinking about our own roles can deepen our understanding of how to help socially devalued people to get and hold onto valued roles, and to help vulnerable people to keep and shore up their valued social roles.
Social roles can be categorized into a number of role domains, such as relationship, work, education, leisure, community, culture, home (residence), etc. (p. 30, A brief introduction to Social Role Valorization, Wolfensberger, Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership and Change Agentry, 2004).
Within any role domain, a particular society (the larger society like the US, Canada or Australia for e.g., but also ‘lower order’ societies like the state or province you live in, the town or city you live in, and so on) will have valued role examples as well as devalued role examples. What roles do you have in your own culture in these different domains? Is one domain more dominant in your life than the others, in terms of importance, time spent in that role, etc.? Let us know what you come up with.