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The aim of this article is to reflect on the strengths and challenges in qualitative comparative research on personal social services. The specific methodological approach that these reflections emerge from is the application of case vignettes in focus group interviews with social workers, working in different welfare regimes. We describe the process of vignette construction and implementation in focus group interviews, and relate this to findings in a large international project with researchers and data from Chile, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Ireland and the UK. Findings reveal that some globally spread professional norms prevail when they are applied locally, while others are more formed through welfare systems with strong contextual norms and legal and socio-economic barriers. Furthermore, the project showed that to use case vignettes and focus groups, in order to compare ‘social work’ in its totality between countries, is really difficult. It appears more fruitful to use such research methods to compare subsectors and sub-disciplines instead of social work as a whole. The strength of the data retrieved from the study is that it makes it possible to separate information on actual practice from information on principles and system norms, thus providing in-practice and on-practice reflections.

This article compares social work in countries representing four different welfare regimes: Chile, the Republic of Ireland (refer to elsewhere as ‘Ireland’), Lithuania and Sweden. The aim is to examine how social workers in different contexts refer to families’ complex needs, how contextual factors influence social workers’ positions and actions, and how they make sense of their work. Social workers in 15 focus groups, 4 per country except for Chile with 3, were interviewed about their conceptions of ‘family’, ‘families with complex needs’, and reasoning about interventions in relation to a fictitious complex case vignette. The understanding of complex needs appears relatively individualized in Chile and Lithuania, while contextual factors were more pronounced in the Irish and Swedish material. Chile, exemplifying a familialized family policy regime, reflects a poverty-compensatory social worker role that also supports familial reproduction; Ireland, a partly de-familialized regime, reflects a supportive and risk-reactive role; Lithuania, a re-familialized regime reflects a patriarchal risk-reducing role and Sweden, a de-familialized policy regime, reflects a rights-oriented and technocratic role. Welfare regimes shape different social work practice contexts. However, to some extent, social workers around the world share a common work ethos in how they, for the best interest of the people they work with, deal with the cross-pressure from social problems and political-ideological priorities.

English Social workers around the world work with families and family complexities in their everyday practice. In this cross-national study, we explore social workers’ family intervention practices related to family definitions and functions, and how social workers balance children’s and parents’ rights and social policies in the proper context. Data derives from focus group interviews with child welfare workers from Norway, Lithuania, Chile and England based on discussions of a common fictitious complex family case (vignette). The four countries chosen for this comparative study are examples of four different welfare systems/regimes. The findings related to this broad area of caring topics are related to how the dimensions of a ‘private’ and a ‘public’ family manifest in social work in the four countries. Social workers in Chile and Lithuania refer to the idea of the private family, while their Norwegian counterparts lean more to the public family. English social workers combine public and private family conceptions in their focus groups, reflecting a system that is partly de-familialized. Spanish Familias públicas y privadas. La visión de los trabajadores sociales sobre la posición de hijos y padres en Chile, Inglaterra, Lituania y Noruega. Los trabajadores sociales en todo el mundo lidian con familias y sus complejidades en su práctica cotidiana. En este estudio de comparación internacional exploramos las prácticas de intervención en familias de trabajadores sociales en relación con sus definiciones y funciones, así como los modos en que los trabajadores sociales equilibran los derechos de padres e hijos y las políticas sociales en el contexto apropiado. Los datos provienen de entrevistas grupales con trabajadores sociales de servicios de bienestar infantil en Noruega, Lituania, Chile e Inglaterra, basadas en la discusión acerca de un caso común ficticio de familia compleja (viñeta). Los cuatro países seleccionados para este estudio comparativo ejemplifican cuatro regímenes o sistemas de bienestar. Los resultados relativos a esta amplia área del tema del cuidado tienen que ver con cómo las dimensiones de “familia privada” y “familia pública” se manifiestan en el trabajo social de estos cuatro países. Los trabajadores sociales de Chile y Lituania hacen referencia a la idea de la familia privada, mientras sus colegas noruegos se inclinan más hacia la familia pública. Los trabajadores sociales ingleses apuntan hacia una combinación de las concepciones de familia pública y privada en sus grupos focales, reflejando un sistema que es parcialmente de-familiarizado.

In Sweden, municipal social services provide help and support for vulnerable people with a variety of needs. Although the family has long been understood to be a focus of social work interventions, it is unclear how it is brought into the casework process in the highly individualised and specialised municipal social services. Therefore, in this study we investigated processes of client-making and role assignment in five service sectors: social assistance, child welfare, substance abuse, disability, and elderly care. We carried out focus group interviews with social workers in each of these sectors in a mid-sized community in central Sweden. Findings showed that clienthood and the family are interpreted in different ways. The family is brought into or kept out of service provisions in ways that are connected to social workers’ construction of the family either as expert, client or non-client. However, the role of the family may also change during the casework process. Findings are examined in relation to theories of the welfare state and implications for family-focused practice are discussed.

This article describes and discusses a number of fundamental aspects of analysing short written narratives. Of particular interest are the code-totality problems that arise during the transformation of several individual stories into a collective narrative. This article starts with a brief introduction to our previous narrative research on Swedish social-work students, which is followed by a description of textual interpretation according to Paul Ricœur's theory of interpretation, and a discussion and elaboration on the different concepts of meaning within his theory. The core of this article is an account of four models for analysing narrative data from several informants. This is followed by a concrete example of the implications that follow from the implementation of these models. We conclude that the degree of heterogeneity in the narrative material affects the choice of the mode of textual analysis and the code compilation.

In June 2016, China promulgated the “Opinions of the State Council on Strengthening the Work of Rescuing Children in Difficulty”, which broadened the coverage of child welfare in China. The document clearly encourages and supports the participation of nonprofit charitable organizations in improving and complementing the public support system for children living in difficulty. This paper reports an assessment study of the relief program for children with congenital heart disease, which was launched by the Red Cross in L Province. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews with six Red Cross employees and 10 parents of stricken families, and telephone interviews with 66 recipient families, were carried out. Additionally, a review of a large number of background documents was analyzed to assess interventions by social organizations in the rescue of children in difficulty. The project was shown to reduce poverty and improve medical treatment for children with congenital heart disease. The role of nonprofit charitable organizations in relation to the child protection system can be characterized as “leak-filling”.

Editorial

Essay

This article focuses on how families are defined and conceptualized by social workers in the Swedish social services. Using a qualitative study design, we carried out telephone interviews with 60 social workers in five major sectors of the social services in two smaller and two larger municipalities. These sectors included elderly care, disability, child welfare, addiction and economic support, with a qualitative content analysis approach used to analyze the data.The results showed that the practices in social service organizations are both individualized and specialized. Social workers primarily focus on the individual as the client when deciding upon interventions, and when asked about how they regard, define and delimit the family in their work, our analysis revealed that different mediating mechanisms were engaged in what can be seen as a deconstruction of the family. These mechanisms included legislation (as a control mechanism), household composition (boundary mechanism) and service needs (professional mechanism), which were used in various ways and to differing degrees within each sector. The resultant five unique and sector-specific conceptualizations of families are implicated in how interventions are constructed and work processes targeted at individuals and families.

Editorial:Families in contexts