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Welfare organisations across the world are becoming more streamlined with less time for building relationships with clients, rendering non-governmental organisations increasingly important for welfare provision. In this paper, we investigate an understudied area in social work: the small talk through which volunteer organisations conduct social work tasks in interaction with clients. The data consist of 108 phone calls to a helpline that offers social contact to older people, recorded in 2020 in Sweden. We use conversation analysis to investigate how callers and call-takers rely on and produce informal sociability in providing support for clients. Specifically, we show that talk about the weather, a prosaic small talk topic, is interwoven with institutional work. By allowing or preventing outdoor activities, weather is a conduit for call-takers and callers to introduce and navigate norms of remaining active as an older adult. Cultural understandings and concerns about good or bad weather allow participants to move between reproducing client/service-provider asymmetries and reaching affiliative affective stances. Thus, the supposedly banal topic of the weather, known as a resource for sociability amongst the unacquainted, is, in this setting, used in ways particular to social work practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global community has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic. LGBTQ+ (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, etc.) youth may face increased stressors amidst the pandemic given their significant mental and sexual health disparities, pervasive rejection — including quarantining in homes with heightened risk of abuse and victimization, and a lack of access to essential resources. Responsive supports are needed at this time for vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth, particularly tailored mental health supports. This critical reflexive paper will highlight, as qualitative social work researchers and practitioners, the swift response to the needs of vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth across Canada during this pandemic. We provide a transparent account of how we have utilized critical reflexivity, cultivated through qualitative research, to support LGBTQ+ youth. This article will elucidate the importance of critical reflexivity in effectively transitioning essential offline mental health services for LGBTQ+ youth to a technology-mediated mental health affirmative intervention. The aim of this paper is to provide qualitative researchers and practitioners practical direction through important insights gleaned by supporting marginalized LGBTQ+ youth during particularly trying times such as a global pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores how feminist women respond to male allies' unintended sexism. I use a feminist autoethnographic method to document and analyze vignettes that explore interpersonal conflicts about unintended sexism. Autoethnography provides the methodology that allows me to link the personal challenges of responding to sexism in caring relationships within the broader cultural context. Three case vignettes demonstrate the processes I undertook. As a social worker, I draw upon process-oriented psychology and feminism to examine the vignettes and analyze key concepts in the experience of responding to unintended sexism. I discuss the importance of communication between social workers who are feminist and male allies when unintended sexism occurs. Finally, I examine the issue of feminists doing the majority of the work challenging sexism. In sharing my personal experiences of responding to male allies' unintended sexism, I anticipate these stories and explorations can be helpful for social workers who are feminist or male allies concerned with communicating about unintended sexism in caring relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of interest in this paper is the relationship between children who live in kinship care and their birth parents – through childhood and adulthood. The focus is on what meaning and content children themselves ascribe to such relationships and how this changes over time. To explore this question, we draw on a qualitative longitudinal data set, in which children who grew up in kinship foster care in Norway were interviewed over a 15-year period. We have selected three cases, where we follow two girls and one boy through their three interviews as children (T1: 11–12 years old), emerging adults (T2: 20–21 years old) and young adults (T3: 28–29 years old). Through the adoption of a methodological approach with similarities to biographical approaches, our analysis gives unique insight into the interviewees' relationships with their birth parents – how they are expressed in each interview as their lives unfold and as circumstances change. More specifically, the analysis gives insight into different types of parent–child relationships and how they may change over time. However, it also shows that the interviewees have different resources available in managing such relationships. This is an issue rarely recognised in child welfare research or practice, yet it is essential if we want to understand the relationship between children who grow/grew up in foster care arrangements and their birth parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on conversation analysis understanding and informing social work practice. Topics include systematic nature of social interaction and constituting effective communication, informing guidance, and policy; and focusing on conversation analysis in particular as a method for examining, understanding, and representing the complexity of social work practice.

Social care assessments in England are envisaged as conversations, implying an informal and congenial encounter, in which both parties have equal roles. However, a fundamental task during an assessment is to gauge eligibility for resources. This article uses conversation analysis to consider audio recorded data of seven social care assessments in England. The article focuses on topic shifts, where the assessor introduces an 'assessment relevant' topic, and we examine how these shifts are managed. Sometimes assessors used what was said by the client or by the carer as a 'pivot', which could produce a feeling of friendly conversation, but simultaneously lead to an intrusion into the client's personal knowledge domain. Assessors also had other strategies for framing a 'next question', such as noticing something in the environment, referring to previous notes or to previous conversations. The conversation might feel 'friendly', but these tactics could lead to the personal life domain of the client being inadvertently revealed and used as relevant for their assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities must often advocate for themselves in many facets of life, including sexuality. Because of this, sexual self-advocacy is an important concept to develop and apply to policy and practice. This paper provides a conceptualization of sexual self-advocacy, a view of sexuality formulated by adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities that is closely tied to the values of the Self-Advocacy Movement. In describing the study process, this paper also puts forth the Participatory Action Research method, Nominal Group Technique, as an accessible method for gaining insight from adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The choice of Nominal Group Technique as a research method was motivated by several factors. Nominal Group Technique served to counterbalance many of the potential research difficulties when working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including the need for understandable, inclusive, and participatory ways to access data from people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and addressed the topic of sexual self-advocacy that is important to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines research conducted between three adults with Asperger’s syndrome and a neuro typical researcher (neuro typical is someone who does not have Asperger’s syndrome). The paper examines the nature of emancipatory research in terms of empowerment, reciprocity and gain. Research that is not conducted solely by ‘service users’ is usually referred to as participatory rather than emancipatory. This paper argues that the principles of emancipatory research can apply to research that involves a non-disabled researcher working alongside service users. The importance of the social model of disability is highlighted as being the basis for the approach taken in this research. The viewpoint of the neuro typical researcher is considered as well as that of the adults with Asperger’s syndrome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the experiences of adolescents in foster care placement with specific reference to participatory decision making in an indigenous African cultural context in South Africa. The emphasis is on the voices of foster adolescents in an indigenous African cultural context and their experiences of inequality when communicating and expressing opinions. The theoretical framework adopted was Interactional Communication Theory in which individuals interact through the use of symbols to co-create and interpret meaning. This theory incorporates some elements of systems theory with the emphasis on the interrelatedness quality as integral to the communication processes. A qualitative exploratory research study was done with 29 adolescents in foster care. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 adolescent participants and as well as enriching the data with two focus groups consisting of eight adolescents in each group. Findings indicate a lack of openness of the foster care system in terms of the communication approach, international covenants and legislation that was used. The approach used was not based on interactional practices and perpetuated inequalities amongst adolescents. Also, the socio-cultural context of the foster family played a major inhibiting and determining role for adolescents regarding the level of free and open communication in their placement pertaining to decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse WhatsApp interactions in a youth care setting. In family-style group care, young people temporarily live in the family of professional foster parents (PFP), while they regularly visit their birth parents (BPs). Our data consist of instant messaging of 11 pairs of PFPs and BPs during 2 months. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), we focused on the social interaction between BPs and PFPs, achieved in and through multi-modally constructed sequences of updates—responses. First, updates are used by BPs in the context of the transfer from the child from/to the PFP marking the transfer of responsibility for the child. Second, PFPs use images as updates to provide BPs quasi-primary access to the experiences of the child. Third, updates are given or elicited in the context of prior problems. Across these functions, we observe that while BPs work to display responsibility, PFPs subtly empower BPs as parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflexive essay focuses on personal aspects of leadership, management, communication, and family experiences while chairing a U.S. social work program in higher education during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Management and leadership in context of the pandemic were also shaped by the author's research and practice perspectives, as well as personal identities and experiences. The essay explores learning some of the emotional boundaries in taking care of self, family, and a social work program during the novel coronavirus crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the findings of the qualitative phase of a New Zealand longitudinal study on vulnerable young people’s transitions to adulthood. The young people were aged between 12 and 17 years at the time of the first interview. The paper focuses on one key finding, how youth enact agency through their relationships with significant others: families, social workers, teachers and care workers. These youth had experienced sustained exposure to harm including abuse, violence, addictions, disengagement from school and mental health issues. The qualitative interviews focused on young people’s experiences with services (child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health and education support services) their key transitions, and the strategies they used to locate support and resources. The thematic analysis of the interviews indicated that a search for agency was a central motif in young people’s experiences. This was reflected in three thematic clusters: making sense of the world, having a voice and acting on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper incorporates peer researchers from refugee backgrounds to deconstruct their experiences of conducting interviews and focus groups with refugee communities in a post-disaster environment in the Canterbury region of New Zealand. The associated dynamics illustrate the contextual intricacies of recruitment, building relationships, the politics of interpreting and engaging with people’s lived experiences in respectful and safe ways. The peer researchers’ experiences highlight several methodological and ethical complexities to critically examine the role of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ as a continuum when working in post-disaster contexts with culturally and linguistically diverse populations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There's a particular 'common sense' required of the contemporary neoliberal subject to 'self-regulate, self-fashion, and self-produce' (Houghton, 2019 : 618). Crucially, this work on the self happens within a political context of a dominant discourse which valorises the resilient, self-regulating and enterprising individual. It is somewhat unsurprising then, that children who struggle to contain intense emotions are referred to therapy. Their experience of therapy, however, ought to then be examined within this broader socio-political context. This article examines the power dynamics of a therapeutic encounter with a child ostensibly in need of greater emotional self-regulation. To investigate how children are positioned in therapy, therapy transcripts are investigated, drawing on Derrida's concepts of hospitality and deconstruction. Utilising a critical discourse analysis of therapy transcripts, we explored the tensions in hosting children in therapy interactions from a counselling session with a 9-year-old girl, Emily, along with her female caregiver, Kate, and her social worker, in the role of therapist. Our Foucauldian inspired power analysis revealed these tensions at work in the therapeutic encounter. We show how Emily enacted her own deconstruction of the story 'The boy who cried wolf', opening the door to a relational understanding of emotional regulation. The findings highlight the need for social workers to engage in reflexive practice; to be able to listen to children without transforming their insights into opportunities to reinforce dominant narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instability in the lives of young people in care is a public health concern. Placement moves and loss of relationships can have serious implications for young people's overall functioning, as well as their future life outcomes. Despite this, research often lacks the perspective and voice of young people in care. In this qualitative research, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to provide a deeper insight into young people's perceptions and beliefs about their care experiences to explore the impact of these on their ability to achieve a sense of stability and permanency across time. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six males from UK foster, residential and semi-independent care homes. The main themes highlighted young people's perceptions of their care environment, relationships with others, sense of self and future under the overarching issue of permanence. Policy and practice implications propose strategies to target instability at the micro-level and how that may facilitate positive outcomes. The study revealed insights that may be helpful for frontline professionals and highlight to policy makers the importance of ensuring environmental and relational stability. An awareness of attachment theory to implement effective caregiving, should be a priority for training parents, caregivers, professionals and policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a reflective consolidation of our practice experience in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 period, in which social work educators and practitioners needed to work online in a prolonged period of social distancing. It illustrates in what ways online practices may denote emerging knowledge and skills that are worth further discussion. These reflections have been consolidated as four knowledge/skill domains in our afterthoughts: i) Context, ii) Conversation, iii) Communication-Modality, and iv) Circulation. These insights may inspire social work educators and practitioners to comprehend the potential of media technologies more fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italy and Spain have been the most-affected countries in the EU by Covid-19 pandemic. Along with the health, social and economic life of the countries, social work and social work education have been turned upside down. In this essay, the authors reflect on the pandemic's impact on social work education activities through social work students' lenses. Accompanying Italian and Spanish students in reflecting on what they were living both, personally and as citizens during Covid-19 and witnessing how, paradoxically, the pandemic offered new opportunities to make important discoveries about key social work issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the advancement of disability rights and augmentative and alternative communication, people with complex communication access needs (CCAN) are often absent from social work, and other qualitative study cohorts. After exploring the underlying reasons for this, the purpose of the study was to investigate successful exceptions of prior research in the field and to bring these together with the findings from a group of 10 participants with CCAN who reveal what they believe is needed to include people with CCAN in qualitative research. These insights are applied specifically to the context of social work research so as to advance an alignment between the ethos of the profession and inclusive practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory visual research methods like Photovoice have become increasingly popular in social science research over the past two decades. While the benefits for co-researchers are well-established, audience studies remain relatively scarce. This represents an important gap in knowledge, especially since advocacy for social change is regarded as a core goal of Photovoice research. The authors aim to contribute to the nascent audiencing literature by exploring the responses from an audience of criminal justice stakeholders to an exhibition of photographs produced by people under probation supervision in Dublin, Ireland. The discussion begins with a critical reflection on the researchers' experience of curating a Photovoice exhibition. Next, audience responses to the images are explored, including the extent to which intended messages reached the target audience and encouraged them to reflect more deeply on the meaning of supervision. Finally, the implications for audiencing studies are considered, particularly the challenge of managing inter-subjectivities in the data analysis process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile working (flexibility about where and when practitioners do their work) is increasingly common across public sector social work, but there has been little research about how practitioners engage with it or its impacts on communication between social workers, their colleagues and the families with whom they work. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of a children's safeguarding social work team in an English local authority who were engaged in agile working. It draws on data from observations, local authority documents, semi-structured interviews, participant research diaries, participants' photographs and the researcher's photographs taken during fieldwork. An analytical frame drawing on Henri Lefebvre's concept of spatial dialectics and Wanda Orlikowski's concept of sociomateriality is used to identify how agile working involves entanglements of practitioners and families with restructured office spaces, digital information systems and mobile devices such as convertible laptop–tablet computers and mobile phones. Innovations such as these are commonly understood as promoting more effective and transparent social work practice, but the study's data show that entanglements between workspaces, digital devices and people in practice are having multiple effects, producing new hierarchies of belonging in space, shaping what can be communicated, and the ways it can be presented and received. The article argues for critical attention to the role of material space in digital and place-based innovations in social work practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relational experiences of young Setswana-speaking adults in South Africa in relation to older persons' use of mobile phones and highlights implications for older adults' care. Research was conducted qualitatively with 14 (9 women and 5 men) young Setswana-speaking adults (19 to 25 years of age) participating in the Mmogo-method®. Findings revealed older persons' needs for mediation from young adults in order to use mobile phones and to contact people. Young adults provided instrumental support for older persons in relation to mobile phone usage but the subjective impact of these interactions determined the nature of relational interactions both for young adults and older persons. Focusing on the young adults, if a negative impact had been experienced, they ignored older persons' care needs or retaliated. In contrast, if the impact had been pleasant, young adults provided assistance unconditionally. A significant implication of the findings is that relational dynamics in moving for control in intergenerational relations involving mobile phone usage challenged the traditional complementarily-defined relationship of older persons leading and young adults assuming a submissive position. Consequently, a constant struggle for control between older persons and young adults around mobile phones interfered with assistance that might have been provided for older persons. Subjective experiences of relational interactions either led to a delay in care for older persons or increased the probability of providing care. Implications for social work practice and the training of social work students are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored effective interviewer strategies and lessons learned based on collection of narrative data by telephone with a subsample of women from a population-based survey, which included sexual minority women. Qualitative follow-up, in-depth life history interviews were conducted over the telephone with 48 women who had participated in the 2009–2010 National Alcohol Survey. Questions explored the lives and experiences of women, including use of alcohol and drugs, social relationships, identity, and past traumatic experiences. Strategies for success in interviews emerged in three overarching areas: (1) cultivating rapport and maintaining connection; (2) demonstrating responsiveness to interviewee content, concerns; and (3) communicating regard for the interviewee and her contribution. Findings underscore both the viability and value of telephone interviews as a method for collecting rich narrative data on sensitive subjects among women, including women who may be marginalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This small-scale qualitative study explores how children participate in their own child protection/child in need planning within a statutory setting in England. Their experience of participation and the impact that voicing their wishes and feelings had on outcomes are highlighted and discussed against a background of conflicting discourses of statutory safeguarding and empowering participation, barriers to engagement and hearing the child’s voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodological debates concerning feminist research design tend to focus more on the process of data collection than on the process of data representation. Nevertheless, data representation is fraught with difficulties, especially in communicating research findings concerning vulnerable populations to diverse individuals and groups. How do feminist social work researchers represent the voice of the research participants to community and service organizations while simultaneously meeting the expectations of the academic or political institutions soliciting the research? In this article, we discuss how we approached this dilemma with data collected through a research study on immigrant women experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. Guided by feminist methodological principles, we drew on the tenets of critical realist theory, integrating this analysis with poetic inquiry to reconstruct the women’s voices in the representations of research data. We discuss these modalities and provide two case examples to illustrate their application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a pilot study that used interviews to collect data from young male apprentices about construction site safety, we were confronted with limited verbal responses. This article is about how we explored this research problem of ameliorating unresponsive interview interactions. The article reviews the options that previous researchers have trialled and developed, and specifically focuses on artefact-mediated interviews conducted with young male participants. We focus on the use of images within artefact-mediated interviews to draw out data from less communicative subjects. Our reflection upon this process proposes that the use of both abstract and concrete images within an artefact-mediated interview can produce diverse and enriched forms of data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

English government policy advocates providing greater choice-making opportunities for service users and their families. However, there is a gap in our knowledge about the role family, especially parents, and also friends play in the choice-making processes of disabled young people. Drawing on data from an English longitudinal study, this article begins to address this gap by exploring disabled young people's shared choice-making with parents and peers. Using qualitative data from 27 interviews with disabled young people with degenerative conditions, it demonstrates that young people want to participate in making choices about their own lives but choices are often made with other people, especially parents and peers. Processes of choice-making are diverse. Parents and/or peers are involved at different stages and in varying degrees with young people depending on personal circumstances. For example, circumstances such as young people's age and experience and the type of choice and its perceived seriousness. Recognizing this complexity and the importance of a holistic approach to choice-making, the article concludes with some practice suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses a first-hand account written by a male voice hearer. He believed that he was exposed to black magic, while psychiatric staff diagnosed him as schizophrenic. Narrative analysis of the voice hearer's text revealed important knowledge, unrevealed if only the content of the text had been analysed. The voice hearer wanted to initiate dialogue with his readers, including professionals such as social workers. They should not simply dismiss a person as schizophrenic before listening to the story of one troubled by his voices. This study offers one possible way of using language within social work to communicate with the client about his condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]