Qualitative Social Work

We examine how the concept of narrative has entered social work over the past 15 years, with special emphasis on research applications. Approaching our task from distinctive standpoints and locations, the article reviews definitions of narrative, criteria for ‘good’ enough narrative research, and patterns in social work journals. Our evaluation uncovered few studies, in contrast to the volume of narrative research in education, nursing and other practicing professions. Three exemplars of narrative inquiry - model research completed by social workers - show the knowledge for practice that can be produced with careful application of narrative methods, in all their diversity. Drawing on our respective locations and experiences, we cautiously suggest some reasons for the paucity of quality research in the USA, and greater representation in Europe.

The article, which is based on qualitative field research in a German family counselling centre, focuses on how professionals, mostly social workers, try to make sense of their cases when sharing their work experiences with each other during their regular case discussions. The sequential and comparative analysis of transcriptions of case discussions reveals certain constitutive features of these speech events and some problems that participants encounter - or even traps in which they can get caught - when trying to arrive at new insights. The detection of such problems does not have to be accepted in a defeatist manner. It is possible to formulate recommendations for professional case discourse on the basis of such (second order) social scientific case analyses of (first order) practical case analyses of professionals.

Encounters between citizens and institutions are characterized by communicative activities where questions and answers are crucial elements. This kind of information eliciting constitutes a necessary part of institutional work in order to efficiently process the case, but it also has normative dimensions. In this study the use of the record in institutional conversations was analysed. The empirical material consists of 30 vocational guidance conversations at a public employment office between institutional actors and long-term unemployed applicants. In these conversations two versions of the applicant were addressed: the person and the record. It is argued that the way the institutional record is introduced and how the two versions are handled in the conversation has important pedagogical implications in the work of transforming the social position of the citizen.

The central focus of the article is a case study in which the author highlights the ways in which social workers and other helping professionals constructed a mother, her daughter and their own realities through the use of authorial devices such as moral characterization, point of view, and other techniques. This analysis is made on the basis of oral and written accounts available in this case and focuses primarily on some of the narrative strategies underpinning interventions in the case. These, it is maintained, served social workers in making their representations persuasive for various publics. Moreover, this analysis shows that social work accounts are also deeply moral narrative strategies. The narrative materials examined here about a mother illustrate how the character of a morally unsuitable woman and parent are constructed in social work accounts. The analysis also demonstrates that such moral constructions then serve as the basis for interventions requiring justification when presented to important professional audiences.

The article collects the variation of forms of subtle persuasion embedded in social work interviewing. It is based on the constructionist idea that institutional interviewing is not an innocent practice of information gathering, but a practice that also produces knowledge and creates identities. A detailed analysis of interview episodes from different social work settings is used to illustrate interview practices, which persuade a client to reconstruct his/her ‘story’. The analysis focuses on four basic devices of persuasion: ‘persuasive questions’, ‘persuasive responses’, ‘asking explanations’ and ‘encouraging questions’. The devices are not clear-cut entities, but they seem in an interesting way to be complementary, and also overlapping in the functions they fulfil. By explicating the interactional construction of the devices, the article aims at contributing to social workers’ understanding of the nature of the means through which practical activities are achieved.

Recently neuropsychiatric diagnoses have come to play an important role in Swedish schools when handling dilemmas encountered in the context of children who experience difficulties. The general interest of the work reported here is the issue of when and how such diagnoses (notably Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD]) are assigned to children. In the present study, an analysis of the interaction between parents (who are reluctant to consent to testing) and the school representatives is reported. It is shown that the experts have already decided beforehand to get the boy tested for ADHD. The attempts to persuade the parents that this would be beneficial for everyone include such arguments as that it would make it easier for the school to help the pupil, and that it would even make it easier for the parents to relate to their child. Any alternatives, such as pedagogical issues or relational/environmental circumstances, were never discussed during the process.