Qualitative Social Work

The starting point of this article is my research experience in Japan. As a non-Japanese, white woman, I spent four months in Japan researching about old age. Those four months were a period of an extensive research activity filled with various events and situations. The main aim of this article is to attend to emotions in fieldwork by illuminating the role of emotions in research and knowledge construction. More specifically, this article is a record of my own experiences of various accumulated emotions and knowledge that have shaped my understanding of what I saw, heard and felt during my fieldwork on old age in Japan. The particular focus is on shame and how shame became the mediator and activator of my knowledge about old age in Japan. The examples presented here demonstrate that openness and ability to feel contribute greatly to the type of research in which we engage, and the type of research we are capable of performing.

One unexpected finding from the postdoctoral fellowship I conducted on the needs and experiences of ethnic minority families in the New South Wales (NSW) child protection system in Australia, was that reports of inadequate supervision seemed high compared to their Anglo-Australian counterparts. The aim of this article was to explore this finding further. This article argues that cultural differences between individualist and collectivist cultures (which families from ethnic minority backgrounds tend to be) contribute to the differential rates of prevalence in reports of neglect. Specifically, the greater role of extended family and community in sharing parenting responsibilities (and thus the inferred reduced care from primary caregivers) and the responsibility levels of children at younger ages (and thus the inferred lack of capacity to self-care) may be contributing to reports of neglect in families from collectivist backgrounds. However, this article also argues that collectivist values that influence what is seen to be adequate parental supervision are not, in the main, harmful (especially if it is the only report for a family) because they do not normalize or perpetuate risk of harm to children. The sample size in this study is small and so caution should be exercised. Nevertheless, this article highlights that caseworkers should be careful not to mislabel the behaviours of parents from collectivist backgrounds as neglectful, because to do so is to use one standard of parenting by which to judge all families and the problems with an absolutist approach to child protection are well known indeed.

Substance-using women use contraception less frequently than do women in the general population, and as a result have higher numbers of unplanned pregnancies. In addition, substance-using women regularly utilize abortion as a means for controlling their number of births. A number of factors complicate this phenomenon, including sex-for-drugs exchanges. This study analyzed data from interviews with women receiving substance abuse treatment in San Francisco, CA. Interviews explored behaviors associated with contraception and abortion as well as complicating factors surrounding prostitution. The existing literature in this area lacks theoretical insight into these behaviors. In this article, the Theory of Contraceptive Risk Taking (TCRT) is used to explore the behaviors of this sample. The TCRT predicts that contraceptive risk-taking (i.e. not using contraception) will occur after a woman navigates a series of steps in a decision-making process, including weighing costs and benefits of contraception and pregnancy, estimating her probability of becoming pregnant, and measuring her ability to obtain an abortion should her risk be unsuccessful. The participants identified many costs of contraception. The theory largely explained the behavior of this sample, except that pregnancy costs and benefits were overlooked. Implications for social work include eliminating logistical barriers to contraception and increasing benefits to contraception by offering financial incentives to use.

Sibling abuse is extremely common, yet child welfare does not provide statutes for its identification and workers are not trained to identify its occurrence. This retrospective study explored adults survivors’ experiences of childhood and adolescent sibling abuse and the family environment that engendered hostile sibling relationships. The varying parental responses from punitive to neglect to collusion with the perpetrator resulted in feelings of helplessness and worthlessness in the victim. Personal narratives of survivors highlight the sibling abusive experience and underscore its devastating repercussions. Recommendations are presented for child welfare to establish sibling abuse as a phenomenon in need of recognition and include siblings in risk assessment.

Research indicates that the need for safe housing and the economic resources to maintain safe housing are two of the most pressing concerns among abused women who are planning to or have recently left abusers. Intimate partner violence (IPV) is frequently an immediate cause or precursor to homelessness and housing instability. The aim of the study is to explore abused women’s experiences accessing affordable, safe, and stable housing. To achieve the aim, adult female IPV survivors answered questions about: 1) steps that were taken to secure housing; 2) safety issues after leaving the abuser; 3) barriers to obtaining housing; and 4) responses from housing and domestic violence advocacy systems related to survivors’ housing needs. Four major themes emerged from the in-depth interviews: 1) stable, affordable housing is critical in increasing safety; 2) survivors face multiple systemic or individual barriers; 3) survivors develop and utilize an array of creative and resourceful strategies; and 4) survivors identified a variety of supportive services tailored to address their needs. The findings inform practice, policy and research for both the housing and domestic violence service systems with an emphasis on collaboration to meet the complex safety and stable housing needs of survivors and their families, particularly following the impact on housing of the 2008 US economic crisis and subsequent recession.

The tension between social workers’ commitment to values and the effectiveness of their interventions has been often observed and has affected the relationship between research and practice. The evidence-based practice model submits practice to strict positivist scrutiny. It suspends or neglects the value laden in the process of experimental intervention, and argues for seeking justified universal rules or causal-effect relations between variables as the guideline to social work intervention. This invokes strong rebuttals from critical reflective practice. Critical reflective practice within the epistemology of interpretivism highlights multi perspectives from different standpoints and tries to substitute universal rules with contextual consensus as the solution to social problems facing social work. This article borrows practice theory from Giddens and Bourdieu and extended case method from Burawoy to elaborate the debate between evidence-based practice and reflective practice. We reconstruct the reflective practice model, and suggest that social work research and practice should be not only mutually dialogued for the transformation of interaction situations, but also extended to macro structural and institutional factors.

This article reviews literature to provide context for a reflective narrative on a collaborative research project undertaken by disabled people, practitioners and academics. This approach required reconsidering many aspects of methodology and practice as the research relationships are altered. The article reflects on how the collaborative and participatory approach was developed and sustained and how it impacted on the research process and its outcomes. The article explores how the group of people worked together on a complex large-scale research project to bring the voices of service users and other key players together in a discussion about social care. The article is written by one of the academic partners and draws on consortium documents and reflections from other consortium members provided for the article.