Abstract
With the exception of the opening article, this issue of Qualitative Social Work (QSW) has a focus on children and young people. Yet in each case the conclusions drawn from the projects transfer readily to research and practice across a wide spectrum.
The display of positive experience and outcomes of social work has been a continuing strand in the publications in the journal. In this vein Wendy Duggleby and her colleagues from universities across Canada explore the challenges of caregivers and their hope experience through an analysis, using Cortazzi’s narrative analysis approach, of 101 journal entries of family caregivers of persons with advanced cancer. The data was condensed into poetic phrases as part of a pilot study evaluating a hope intervention for family caregivers of terminally ill cancer patients. The article has added value through its depiction of how then poetic narratives were developed, and also through the writers’ thoughtful reflections on the process of doing such research.
Narrative inquiry also frames Carolina Øverlien’s article on children in shelters for abused women talking about the future. She suggests that these narratives can be understood as ‘narratives of solution’ – ‘not stories of resignation, but of resilience’. The most dominant genre in the narratives about the future was narratives of ‘the good life’, although characterized as ordinary life that most would take for granted. Other troublesome issues concerning the future were also brought up. These often related to the abuser. ‘The abuser, or someone who resembles him, can turn up like a “Jack-in-the-box” in many possible situations.’
Research regarding children in Norway is also the focus of Agnes Andenæs’ article, and evidences the strength of qualitative social work in Nordic countries. It draws on a study of 109 children aged 6–12 years who were placed out-of-home by Children’s Welfare Services. Central to her article is conceptualizing placements as a change of residency, so that new sources of knowledge appear to be relevant, such as studies about children’s everyday life, and knowledge about ordinary moves in ordinary families. This apparently simple insight opens up the potential relevance of a range of research across the social sciences, exemplified by the rewarding results from this study.
Natalie Bolzan and Fran Gale’s article describes an application of Participatory Action Research in which ‘interrupted spaces’ were created to explore the concept of social resilience among marginalized young people. Although the underlying idea of ‘resilience’ is not new, it has carried a certain vogue over the last decade or so, and the writers review how the idea has developed in that time. They summarize their inquiry as follows: ‘In this “interrupted space” in which the young people were given responsibility, limited but meaningful resources, no censorship or boundary setting by adults and a guarantee that this space would exist for at least 18 months the young people created projects which engaged with the community of adults in most unexpected ways.’
Karen Broadhurst, Kim Holt and Paula Doherty draw on evidence regarding child protection practice in the UK, through a study of interaction between parents and professionals – an issue, as they rightly remark, of considerable international interest. Using the methods of applied discourse analysis, and influenced by Goffman and other work on institutional discourse, they explore asymmetries in talk between parents and professionals. Within this, they explore forms of parental resistance, either overt or passive, such that ‘parental “compliance” with the institution’s preferred turn-taking design was difficult to achieve.’ They conclude that ‘work to engage parents, appears to take place too late, to avert care proceedings in many cases’.
Nicole Hennum also explores the experience of children and parents within child welfare proceedings, and how conversations between the social workers and parents function as what she calls ‘disciplining tools’. Unlike the previous articles in this issue, she analyses material in case files collected during the course of one year’s ethnographic fieldwork divided between two child protection agencies. Using Foucault’s writings about technologies of control as a point of departure, she expands on how ‘children become subjects through what is perceived as the sharing of confidences, while the parents become subjects through confessions and admissions.’ Parents, for example, are disciplined by ‘making them think reflexively about their own parental behaviour and by presenting certain kinds of knowledge to be used by the parents for understanding the child.’
The issue closes with reviews that include, as a first for the journal, reflections by Joanne Terrell – a previous contributor to QSW – on narrative accounts from young men on death row that was written for young people. Kevin Corcoran and Aiden Springer’s review contribution is addressed to the same genre. Karen Staller tells us these were prompted by a visit to a robotics conference. As Karen, with Michal Krumer-Nevo, takes over the editorship of the journal it will be in good hands!