Qualitative Social Work

Hope is an important psychosocial resource that has been found to support family caregivers. In order to further understand the challenges of caregivers and their hope experience, we analyzed, using Cortazzi’s (2001) narrative analysis approach, 101 journal entries of family caregivers of persons with advanced cancer. The data was condensed into poetic phrases to reflect structural categories outlined by Cortazzi of event, description and evaluation resulting in a poetic narrative entitled ‘The Chaos of Caregiving and Hope’. Each stanza of the poetic narrative describes the day-to-day experiences of the participants’ chaos and hope. We believe that looking at the caregiving experience through poetic presentation provided new insights into the lives of caregivers caring for terminally ill cancer patients. These insights are related to the intensity of the chaos, and how hope is present in their daily lives.

The aim of this article is to study children living with their mothers in shelters for abused women and their narratives about the future. Voices of five children and adolescents (11–17 years old) and their hopes and concerns about the future are analyzed using narrative analysis. The analysis shows that the children narrate ‘the good life’, which can be understood as narrating ‘ordinary life’, for example, everyday life with school, a safe home and friends. The article proposes that ‘the good life narrative’ is part of a master narrative at the shelter. Although the children do not narrate past events, their stories are positioned against their lives both prior to and during their shelter stay. These narratives can be understood as narratives of solutions and, as such, provide important knowledge about children living in shelters for abused women and their hopes for the future.

Within both politics and research children have been increasingly depicted as autonomous individuals with a right to be heard and have a say. Children's Welfare Services has been criticized for neglecting to view children as knowledgeable actors in their own cases. In referring to a national Norwegian study with 109 children aged 6–12 years who were placed out-of-home by Children's Welfare Services, this article proposes strategies to make children more visible in practice as well as within research related to Children's Welfare Services. By conceptualizing such placement as a change of residency, or, more colloquially, the ‘child on the move’, new sources of knowledge appear to be relevant; namely studies about children's everyday life, even encompassing knowledge about ordinary moves in ordinary families. The article concludes that importing methodological approaches and substantial knowledge from research on the everyday lives of unremarkable children to the field of Child Welfare Service may help establish children as key agents in their own cases, and even reduce the process of ‘othering’ welfare clients.

In this article we discuss the advantages of using an ‘interrupted space’ to explore understandings of Social Resilience with marginalized young people. In researching with communities of youth who live with multiple disadvantage and who may have little experience of social resilience we sought to create an ‘interrupted space’ in their daily lives in order to explore how they may construct or define social resilience given a different life world. Examples are given of how an interrupted space enabled insight into aspects of social resilience which may have remained hidden had there been no ‘circuit breaker’ in these young people’s lives enabling them to contribute. Where new opportunities were provided those who may have previously been excluded from dialogue were enabled to experience and contribute to an understanding of social resilience.

The topic of parental engagement in the context of child protection is of significant international interest, given much documented problems of achieving effective ‘partnerships’ where professional agencies raise serious concerns about children. This article reports the findings of a qualitative study of interaction between professionals and parents in the quasi-judicial setting of pre-proceedings meetings in England. Recent legislative changes in England and Wales have aimed to improve the prospects for effective partnership work with parents through a revised pre-proceedings process. Through detailed examination of parent-professional interaction using methods of applied discourse studies, the study highlights the constraints that institutional requirements create in terms of the differential rights and obligations of parents and professionals. Inevitably, that talk is asymmetrically organized in favour of the local authority, leads to resistance on the part of parents. The study highlights problems of engaging parents who display both active and passive forms of resistance, as they seek to challenge or reject organizational goals. The study concludes with broader observations about the likely limits of legislative efforts that seek to ‘re-order’ the complex relationships between parents and professionals in child protection work.

The article presents findings from a detailed examination of dialogical sequences recorded in written documents from Norwegian child welfare services. Using a frame drawn from Foucault's theory of technologies of control, it describes how conversations between the social workers and parents function as disciplining tools. By emphasizing children's rights under Norwegian law and scientific based knowledge about children, the social workers regulate the parents’ life towards what is culturally considered as proper parenting in Norway. In doing so, they assign the children and the parents different subject positions in the dialogues. I will argue that the children become subjects through what is perceived as the sharing of confidences, while the parents become subjects through confessions and admissions.