Qualitative Social Work

Arts-based research methods have an important place in social work scholarship. Arts-based research methods, such as poetic inquiry, highlight lived experiences through creativity, emotion, and embodiment. This paper shares findings from a qualitative study that investigated social workers’ experiences with compassion in their professional practice through poetic inquiry. Findings are disseminated in a found poem that was collaboratively co-created by the researcher and study participants. The found poem highlights how compassion is a central and guiding force within social work practice. Compassion and connection remain core dimensions of the social work discipline and social work education, scholarship, and practice may benefit from continued exploration of compassion and related constructs.

Despite astonishing growth in the multiracial population since 2010 and increased empirical scholarship on the experiences of persons from two or more racial groups, little progress has been made to extend multiracial identity development theory. Drawing from constructivist grounded theory and multiple visual grounded theory (VGT) frameworks, our secondary qualitative study analyzed 26 participatory diagrams from two previous qualitative studies examining multiracial identity development. In alignment with our novel VGT analytic approach, we co-constructed a visual theoretical model that more accurately represents the dynamism between complex developmental and ecological processes that interactively influence multiracial identity development over time. Our findings suggest that multiracial identity development is a dynamic process influenced by critical events and experiences, including trauma and abuse, movement of place, and turning points and milestones that mutually shape a multiracial person’s social environments, interpersonal relationships, and sense of self. Reflecting on our innovative study, we advocate for more critical, emancipatory methods like VGT that have the potential to overcome epistemological barriers in research that restrict the more accurate and complete storytelling of the multiracial experience.

The American education system has been significantly disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led schools to shut down and convert to remote learning environments in spring 2020. However, long before these school closures, school social workers (SSWs) have faced significant practice dilemmas, as they have encountered obstacles to their engagement in best practices. While initial pandemic school closures presented SSWs with a range of uncertain situations, they also provided the possibility to respond to practice demands in different and dynamic ways. This article explores the pandemic's impact upon SSWs’ practice, and how SSWs responded in turn as they quickly adapted their practice during this widespread, ongoing crisis. Informed by crisis theory, previous analyses of SSW practice trends and dilemmas, and a review of traditional social work values and ethics, we conducted three focus groups in July 2020 with SSWs during the pandemic’s early months. From these interviews, we learned that participants’ work was disrupted by dramatic shifts in school and community settings, as well as changes in support needs within their respective school communities. Those disruptions gave way to substantial shifts in practice, which reflect a more prominent role for systemic practice and for traditional social work values in SSW decision-making. These findings offer implications for post-pandemic practice, and practice in other host settings.

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe. The viral outbreak was followed by rapid changes in people’s everyday and working lives. Because of the wide-scale societal restrictions that took place to prevent the pandemic, social work was forced to take a digital leap. In this article, we examine Finnish social workers’ experiences of extending the use of digitally mediated social work (DMSW) in working with clients during the first wave of the pandemic, the spring of 2020. The data consist of 33 social workers’ personal diaries, which are analysed using a qualitative theory-based content analysis. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial triad will be utilised in theorising how social workers represent DMSW through three dimensions of space, that is, how they perceive, conceive and live digital spaces when encountering their clients and how physical, mental and social spaces are embodied in the representations. The results suggest that the three dimensions of space 1) basis of, 2) conceived and 3) lived DMSW intertwine closely together. The results reveal how the physical space, including IT infrastructure, its functionality and applicability, along with the organisational contexts, form a bedrock for the social workers’ DMSW practice and had a decisive impact on their experiences. Second, the conceived space consists of workers’ cognitive and emotional elements, such as competencies, preconceptions and attitudes towards ICT. Finally, the third dimension of spatiality concludes with the social and relational aspects of the user experiences and encounters between clients and social workers.

Although digital narrative methods lend themselves well to participatory, action-oriented inquiry, these relatively new methods also raise questions about potential risks involved in using digital technologies to engage marginalized groups in social work research. This article examines the feasibility, challenges, and opportunities of using digital narrative methods in anti-oppressive social work research (AOSWR) by providing empirical insights from the AltaVoces project—an AOSWR project that used digital narrative methods to engage Latino youth. This case study demonstrates the compatibility and feasibility of digital narrative methods in AOSWR by examining to what extent the AltaVoces project: (1) used methods that center the contexts, voices, and experiences of oppressed peoples, recognizing the social construction of knowledge and the politics inherent in knowledge creation, (2) critically interrogated power arrangements within research relationships and made efforts to form authentic, collaborative relationships and share power with co-researchers, and (3) acknowledged oppressive systems and institutions and reflected a commitment to transforming, dismantling, or abolishing them through the research purpose, process, and products. We found that digital tools offered new possibilities for centering the voices of Latino youth, rebalancing power in research relationships, and connecting knowledge to action through digital products, in alignment with AOSWR, but also introduced new power hierarchies and risks related to producing digital material. The AltaVoces project provides one example of how digital narrative research may be implemented and evaluated using the integrative AOSWR framework, exposing several aspects of digital narrative research that warrant specific attention and presenting practical strategies for doing so.

The availability, affordability and usability of communication technologies have created new ways to conduct interpersonal qualitative research. Access to digital communications remains uneven, but the online environment provides an alternative, and at times a potentially preferable, research space. As Covid-19 has interrupted and disrupted the dominant assumption that qualitative research must be conducted in person, this paper outlines possibilities and reservations of online interpersonal methods. Though the standard ethical considerations of qualitative research hold true, we argue that these are necessary, but often inadequate, in the contexts of conducting online synchronous interpersonal research. Through centring relational and reflexive practice, we consider the associated pragmatic, methodological and ethical domains from feminist and virtual–material positional perspectives. Unpacking the complexities and possibilities of researching digital environments, we present six guiding principles to inform ethically responsive, methodologically robust and pragmatically feasible approaches to conducting online interpersonal qualitative research.

The burdens of working in the frontline of the child welfare and protection services are well documented. Studies have identified individual and organisational indicators that lead to burnout, turnover and retention. In this article, I direct attention to enacted local cultures in child welfare teams and explore how embedded social practices contribute to social workers’ coping. I apply the concept of worker collectivity to explore how informal social practices in regular team meetings mobilise action and commitment among the team members. The article draws on an ethnographic study of two Norwegian frontline child welfare offices, involving intermittent observation of everyday work practices for two years. My analysis suggests that the collectivity is a crucial condition in bearing the demands of child welfare work.

The study critically explores the meanings and expressions of co-responsibility based on the experience of Chilean social workers involved in public-private child welfare. It draws upon critical institutionalism to frame thematic analysis of interviews with practitioners participating in these arrangements. Results show that meanings and expressions of co-responsibility are diverse and co-exist in intervention. Some meanings are that co-responsibility is the responsibility assumed by the State as the first guarantor of rights with a private that takes responsibility for clients. It also means collaboration in a neoliberal system. Regarding expressions, it takes the form of a programmatic execution that operationalizes the rights approach. Another one is that co-responsibility expresses in individualistic performance that neglects the other colleague. Implications for critical social work practice, policy, and scholarship are discussed, based on the diversity of meanings and expressions of co-responsibility identified.

Transcultural placements occur frequently in foster care, and impact the ethnic identity of ethnic minority foster youth. Studies that investigate how foster youth’s ethnic identity develop over time, and what role ethnic minority as well as ethnic majority influences play, are extremely scarce. Therefore, we conducted a longitudinal qualitative study, in which we explored how transculturally placed foster youth develop their ethnic identity and what fluctuations occur over time. Results show that the ethnic identity of foster youth seems to be influenced by a sense of belonging towards foster parents, birth parents and peers, as well as by the foster youth’s ability to cope with receiving contradictory ethnicity messages. Furthermore, societal movements and discussions about discrimination and racism impact the way foster youth view themselves as being an ethnic minority in majority society. In future, more attention should be paid to how foster youth can be guided by foster parents and foster care workers in safely exploring an ethnic identity of their own, and how a positive bond with both foster parents and birth parents, can further contribute to this process.

Employing critical autoethnography, this article conveys how over my four decades of social work, I have come to adopt a contextualized social work stance and identifies what emerge as four key areas of contextualized social work. These include attention to race, ethnicity and culture as experienced in the local environment, the local articulation of social conditions and appropriate social work responses, the activation of local knowledge generation and curation, and finally, addressing and resisting expert power. Such theorization of contextualized social work augments previous work that positions contextualized social work as countering dominant conceptualizations of social work and instead centering on a critical interrogation of the local, foregrounding local understandings of social conditions, and privileging local/(i)Indigenous knowledge production and ways of doing and being. This critical understanding of context unsettles dominant notions of context by focusing on power relationships. I hope that my story will add to the growing discussion regarding alternative modes of practice and education that counter dominant Westernized individualized social work perspectives and promote decolonized approaches.

Gender roles and gender stereotypes are culturally and socially constructed. Previous studies suggested that the Afghan community is a male-dominated and conservative society, where men are more visible in social activities, and women remain responsible mainly for household tasks. This research aimed to show Afghan women’ perceptions of gender roles and the possibilities for and barriers in Australian society to change those roles after their settlement in Australia. The study involved semi-structured interviews with 21 Afghan women who had been living in Australia between 6 months and 10 years. The interviews were conducted face to face or by telephone, in either Farsi (Persian) or English. An inductive thematic analysis was used to explore the data and build themes. Afghan women were aware of gender roles, patriarchy, and gender inequality, and they hoped to address those issues now as they live in a society that offers more freedom to women. Moving to Australia had enhanced women’s possibilities, self-confidence and skills and inspired many to go beyond traditional stereotypes and seek out options previously denied to them on the basis of their gender. However, their attempts at realising gender equality often met with the disapproval of their family or the wider Afghan community.

This article explores the challenges faced by women with disabilities in combining the roles of ‘mother’ and ‘worker’ in Lithuania and reflects on the strategies mothers employed to overcome these. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with twenty women with a variety of (dis)abling conditions and diverse life experiences between 2014 and 2018. In-depth thematic analysis by qualitative research teams revealed a constant tension in women’s aspirations to have a family and work. This revealed women’s enormous personal resources which facilitated them to overcome challenges they faced in motherhood as well as seemingly insurmountable obstacles to employment. However, within the vicious circle of social and economic challenges, they fought their battles with silent compliance, which hid their experiences and potentially denied them opportunities for support. This research reveals a policy response in Lithuania that categorises disability as an individual issue to be overcome rather than a socially constructed experience. The findings indicate the need for reframing understanding at macro, as well as micro-level policy interventions. At the micro-level, sensitive forms of professional support would help mothers with disabilities to choose more pronounced strategies of coping while also maintaining their dignity and privacy. These findings provide insights into the specific situation of women in Lithuania but are also relevant to many other contexts.