Analysing Social Work Communication

Hall, Christopher; Juhila, Kirsi; Matarese, Maureen T.; Nijnatten, Carolus van

doi:10.4324/9780203084960

Cited by 38 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…Discourse and conversation analyses based on ethnomethodology provide tools for examining these kinds of everyday interactions in institutions (Heritage ; Silverman ; Hall et al . ).…”

Section: Studying Choices In Interactions Between Service Users and Pmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Accepting and Negotiating Service Users' Choices in Mental Health Transition Meetings

et al. 2014

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Across Western welfare regimes, policies emphasize that service users should have more choices regarding their services. This article examines how service choices are presented, responded to and decided in interactions between service users and professionals in mental health transition meetings. Choice is often associated with consumerist user involvement ideas, but in mental health choice also relates to democratic user involvement approach and to shared decision making between professionals and service users. The results of the study show that professionals construct service users as consumers by offering service options in choice making sequences, expecting users to make appropriate choices. Service users mostly act like consumers by responding to these choice options. However, the study also demonstrates that the professionals do not always accept the user' first choice but respond to them as non-preferred. Sometimes they also suggest choices on behalf of the users. In these 'non-accepting' sequences choices are negotiated in interaction between the parties, rather than users acting as autonomous choice makers. The sequences are based on two kinds of professional reasoning: first the professional-led needs assessment and second the structure of the service package that the user is being offered. This negotiation has elements of shared decision making and the 'logic of care'. But it also has elements of paternalist control which 2 challenge both consumerist and democratic service user involvement and suggests consideration of more collectively oriented service user actions.

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“…Discourse and conversation analyses based on ethnomethodology provide tools for examining these kinds of everyday interactions in institutions (Heritage ; Silverman ; Hall et al . ).…”

Section: Studying Choices In Interactions Between Service Users and Pmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…In analyzing the data we apply discursive methods to interaction analysis (Hall et al . ), especially conversation analytic notions about sequentiality, focusing on the professionals' and the service users' ordered actions in choice making sequences (Heritage ): Who starts the choice sequence and how (the initiatory act)? …”

Section: Data and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Accepting and Negotiating Service Users' Choices in Mental Health Transition Meetings

et al. 2014

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“…Over the past two decades, research into social workers' communicative practices with children has expanded significantly (Lefevre, ; Luckock et al, ; McLeod, ; McLeod, ; Morgan, ; Author's own/R, 2014; Author's own/W, 2009, 2011). Research by members of the Discourse and Narrative Approaches to Social Work and Counselling Network (Hall, Juhila, Matarese, & van Nijnatten, ; Hall & White, ) has begun to build a significant body of research based on the application of discourse and narrative research methodologies to the texts of everyday professional practice encounters, such as home visit conversations. As part of these developments, there has been a noticeable shift in focus from communicative practices in the context of exceptional and extraordinary circumstances (Brandon et al, ; Hawthorn & Wilson, ; Laming, , ; Munro, ) to communication in ordinary and everyday social work practice (Authors' own, 2017; Ferguson, , ).…”

Section: Contextualizing Communicative Practices In Child Care Socialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social workers' reflexive understandings of their “everyday” communications with children

Hadfield

Ruch

Winter

et al. 2019

Child & Family Social Work

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Over the past two decades, the use of ethnographic research methods, in combination with a range of discursive, conversational, and multimodal analytical approaches, have provided vivid accounts of the complex nature of social workers' everyday communication. This paper discusses the potential and the problems of combining a video‐stimulated recall methodology with an explicit theoretical framework, in order to generate critical reflexive “insider” accounts of social workers' direct encounters with children. The framework employed was based on an adaptation of Goffman's concepts of “framing” and “footing,” which were integrated into an analytical process designed to theorize social workers' critiques regarding the nature of their communication with children. Three detailed case exemplars are used to demonstrate the potential of this methodology to explore the “delicate” agency required by social workers in the practice of authentic communication in complex professional inquiries with children. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the theoretical and practical issues associated with utilizing reflexive methodologies in professional contexts.

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“…In producing detailed qualitative description and analysis of naturally occurring data, the research discussed above has been crucial in illuminating the complex task of social work, including how aspects of the role that are seemingly at odds with each other play out in practice (Ferguson, 2011;Hall et al, 2014;Ruch et al, 2017). The current study employs quantitative methods and uses a different sampling and analytic strategy, aiming to complement these qualitative studies by exploring the relationships between social work skills within a comparatively large data set.…”

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confidence: 99%

Patterns of practice: An exploratory factor analysis of child and family social worker skills

Forrester

Killian

Westlake

et al. 2019

Child & Family Social Work

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There is relatively little research on the communication skills that social workers use in direct practice with families. This study explores patterns of practice skill found in child and family social work home visits. The study analysed 127 practice interactions in family homes, coding for seven dimensions of worker skill using a coding framework drawn from motivational interviewing. Exploratory factor analysis was employed to establish patterns of skill within the data and to group key dimensions of skill. The findings make two contributions. First, three fundamental dimensions of good practice emerged, which we characterize as care and engagement, good authority, and support for behaviour change. Second, in exploring the relationship between "care" and "control" elements of social work, skilled social workers were able to combine good authority and empathic engagement, whereas those who were less skilled in use of authority were also less good at engagement. This contributes to debates about care and control in social work. The usefulness of these dimensions for conceptualizing practice in child and family social work is discussed and directions for further research are suggested. KEYWORDS child protection policy and practice, communication skills, motivational interviewing focused on direct work with children and highlighted the complexity of such conversations and the ways in which social workers manage

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Analysing Social Work Communication

Cited by 38 publications

References 0 publications

Accepting and Negotiating Service Users' Choices in Mental Health Transition Meetings

Accepting and Negotiating Service Users' Choices in Mental Health Transition Meetings

Social workers' reflexive understandings of their “everyday” communications with children

Patterns of practice: An exploratory factor analysis of child and family social worker skills

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