Abstract
Karen and I decided to take turns in preparing the editorial for the journal. This happens to be my turn: however, on the day I was supposed to start writing it, I was instead sitting in a secure room in my home in Beer-Sheva, 40 km from Gaza. This is the Middle East, and as someone who was born and who has lived in Israel all her life, wars – or as they are sometimes euphemistically called, ‘operations’ – are something I know and know well. But through the last week, even as I tried to concentrate on my work, I was preoccupied with other matters: attentiveness to the wail of the siren, the race to the secure room, the pause before the ‘boom’ confirming the impact of the missile. All served to distract me from the academic matters at hand. It made the journal seem far away; but it did not make social work seem far away.
The situation afforded me the opportunity to think about my students, involved in the project avoda partanit l’shinui chevrati, Casework for Social Change. The project works with the poorest and most excluded families – in co-operation with (and sometimes against) the social agencies – developing and employing critical social work methods and praxis.
When the bombings started, most public institutions, including welfare organizations, closed on safety grounds. Students were not able to meet their clients; indeed some agencies instructed their social worker employees not to initiate contact with their clients, who were consequently expected to seek support-resources from the general emergency services. I worry when interpersonal relationships in social work are sacrificed and replaced by bureaucratic mandates. Even a simple, humane gesture like asking, ‘how do you manage these days?’ becomes radical practice when it challenges expectations of detached professionalism.
The students resisted. The list serve database for our project was called into action and students reached out to individual families, reporting back information from those with whom they had made successful contact. Some reported families having acute problems with hungry children, because schools were shut and the children were not receiving hot meals; others reported exhausted mothers, with no support, being worn down from taking care of children regressing in the face of the tensions, soiling their clothes and bed linen. The information from the students brought it home to us: the reality of poverty in times of war; it was a reality punctuated with familiar faces and concrete examples.
Other students were able to share rare information, not registered anywhere, about community resources, that have sprouted as a spontaneous response to the situation at the local level: ‘the shelters on Hazav and Hashuk streets are open from morning to evening, and there are volunteers there to play with and look after the children.’ ‘Food packages are available at Beer-Sova, a soup kitchen, the person to contact is Maria’. A new student who has been with the project for only four weeks, wrote, ‘this correspondence makes me feel I’m a part of a big family.’
Thoughts about the ‘big family’, a model of practice we try to establish with, and for, the families with whom we work, were buzzing in my head when Karen skyped, offering a listening ear and concrete assistance: ‘Do you want me to lead with the coming issue?’ she asked. We talked about the situation, about social work and about our plans for the journal. This conversation, the knowledge of Karen’s generous offer, the bond I felt with her, reconnected me to the journal.
If the aim of qualitative research, as Norman Denzin says (in an interview to be published in a coming issue of Qualitative Social Work), is ‘to make the world visible’, then social workers should be the artisans of qualitative research; the professional ethics of social work is about making people known and heard, linking people and creating solidarity. This is our aim. But is it always our expertise? Do we educate our students to feel solidarity, to make it the engine of their practice? Does our research embody the ethics of solidarity? What kind of social work do we want to have, and what kind of social work do we actually have? How do we experience the gap between the two, and what can be done in order to fulfil this ethically? These are only a small selection of the questions that we ask, and hope to answer, with Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice. This issue offers a glimpse at the rich treasury of possibilities offered up by the profession.
The issue opens with three articles that use different perspectives to highlight the importance of narratives in social work practice and research. The first, by Yasmin Gunaratman, focuses on narratives of British palliative care professionals regarding situations of caring for older people from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Based on a conceptualization of culture not as a fixed entity but rather as an something ‘that is contingent … and has the capacity to change and to be changed; to bend and curve with the relationships and contexts it finds itself in,’ the author calls on professionals to develop an ‘emotional elasticity’ which will enable us to feel our own vulnerability and to be ‘open to the discontinuities, diversity and surprises of cultural identifications and performances’.
The second article, by Anne Jansen and Agnes Andenæs explores stories, narrated by Norwegian youth in residential homes, about their futures. Using a psychological approach to narrative, the writers emphasize the ways by which narrative links the present with the future, suggesting that the storied future can shape the present.
In the third article, Patricia McNamara reflects on two longitudinal narrative studies with children and young people to present a rights-based perspective to narrative research. Through this reflection the author distills a set of principles for a rights-based research agenda.
The next two articles use interviews to explore the experiences of parents who cope with challenging life circumstances. Leslie Doty Hollingsworth, Danielle Swick and Youn Joon Choi, tell the stories of mothers whose children were taken from their custody through the narratives of three US mothers with serious mental illnesses. The article considers their positive and negative interactions vis-a-vis the processes of child custody. The authors challenge professionals and policy makers to break the link between a diagnosis of serious mental illness and the automatic assessment of risk posed by the ailing mother to her children. The results prompt the authors to hypothesize that positive interactions, occurring across the life span of the mothers, including interactions with service providers, can buffer the effects of negative circumstances and interactions.
May-Britt Solem also challenges hegemonic concepts regarding parenting, in this case, the concept of avoidance behavior as dysfunctional in parenting. She analyzes parents' accounts of everyday interactions with their children, to underscore the importance of the socio-cultural context in shaping their behavior. Presenting parental actions of avoidance as adaptive and proactive, this article questions the dichotomy between “normal” and “clinical” parenting behaviours.
The next two articles, based on the experiences of PhD students, and focus on two important aspects of qualitative interviews – interviewing, and data collection.
The first, by Susanne Bahn and Llandis Barratt-Pugh, proposes to manage the limited verbal responses from less-educated male interviewees by artefact-mediated interviews. The authors explain their use of artefacts – and differentiate between abstract and concrete images – to show their diverse influence on the received data. In the second article, Huibrie Pieters and Katrina Dornig share their experiences as PhD students who created a unique partnership in analysing their qualitative data. The partnership, which as they say, helped them ‘to move through the academic alphabet – from ABD to PhD’ is described in detail, inspiring us by showing the degree of depth and intimacy research relationships could reach.
The last article in the issue uses relational poetry, an experimental qualitative format, as an entry into co-constructed realities of marginalization and oppression. The reading of a poem by the Ethiopian-born poet and social worker Martha Kuwee Kusma evokes in the author, Emmanuel Taiwo (Akin), a response, which is written in the form of another poem. These two poems produce a poetic dialogue, emphasizing “the inter-subjectivities of the human experience and the co-construction of meaning arising from multiple experiences, realities and truths”.
The issue concludes with the Review Essay’s section. This section starts with an introductory piece by Mark Hardy who underlines the value of trust as an anchor for the following two reviews. Reviewing Patrick Brown's and Michael Calnan’s Trusting on the Edge: Managing uncertainty and vulnerability in the midst of serious mental health problems, Hannah Jobling puts trust on the agenda, calling on us to view it ‘more broadly, not only as applying between services and service users, but also as a perceived duty to win and keep the trust of carers, local communities and society as a whole.’ The last piece is Ian Shaw’s detailed critical review of Martin Packer’s The science of qualitative research. Shaw’s review title – an allusion to Dory Previn’s song ‘Angels and devils the following day’ – points to the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in the relationships people have, not only with other people but also with theories.