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Examining the concepts underpinning the reasoning processes of social worker's decision‐making provides important insights into how social work practice is undertaken. This paper examines one of the major discourses used by social workers in decision reasoning in a non‐governmental organization child protection context in Aotearoa/New Zealand: family maintenance. This study found that family maintenance as a concept was strongly privileged by social workers. This resulted in attempts to preserve families and created a hierarchy of preferred decision outcomes. A preference for family maintenance was supported by legal, moral, psychological and Māori cultural concepts. This pattern of constructs underpinned the ‘weighing up of harms’ when considering removal, and generally reflected a child welfare orientation. In addition to this, it was found that ‘family’ was broadly defined, and could include people who had a relationship with the children, or Māori definitions of extended family, in addition to legal ones. [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 investigates the reasoning processes of social workers in child protection social work as they make decisions. Within this interpretive process, they assign meaning to clients' behaviours in a context containing a multitude of competing discourses relating to the nature and cause of clients' problems. The study used a qualitative approach, specifically a critical incident framework. It asked workers to describe cases they felt ‘pleased with’ and explain the reasoning processes they used in those cases. It also asked clients their views of decisions made about them. This article draws on social constructionist theorising to describe and analyse the discourses used to frame the aims of practice and the causes of clients' problems. It found that workers valued family maintenance and sought to bolster this while managing potential risk. In the cases selected by workers, they constructed the causes of clients' problems in non-blaming but individualised ways, viewed clients as being capable of change and honest in their dealings with workers. It is proposed that these ways of viewing contributed to maintaining relationships with clients despite the challenges of balancing risk, care, control and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]