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Background: Crisis helplines aim to provide a short-term intervention or guide users to professional mental health services, but many users return to helplines despite having professional mental health contacts. Aims: To contribute knowledge on users’ perspectives on the role of crisis helplines in relation to their professional mental health contacts, we aimed to investigate how online helpline users describe such services. Methods: We used thematic analysis of 100 naturally occurring interactions from a Swedish online crisis helpline. Results: The users viewed the helpline as a safe space, a partner, or an alternative to bad professional services. Users oriented to ongoing helpline usage as crucial for their well-being while they described using professional mental health services to be able to stay alive. Limitations: The findings are limited to the nature of the different themes. Conclusion: The view on crisis helplines as a short-term intervention relies on an idealized view on crisis intervention that does not represent users’ views. User control is at the core of the appeal of helplines, but it is also a key challenge for organizations and volunteers.

Robot animals, designed to mimic living beings, pose ethical challenges in the context of caring for vulnerable patients, specifically concerning deception. This paper explores how emotions become a resource for dealing with the misinformative nature of robot animals in dementia care homes. Based on observations of encounters between residents, care workers, and robot animals, the study shows how persons with dementia approach the ambiguous robots as either living beings, material artifacts, or something in-between. Grounded in interactionist theory, the research demonstrates that emotions serve as tools in the sense-making process, occurring through interactions with the material object and in collaboration with care workers. The appreciation of social robots does not solely hinge on them being perceived as real or fake animals; persons with dementia may find amusement in "fake" animals and express fear of "real" ones. This observation leads us to argue that there is a gap between guidelines addressing misinformation and robots and the specific context in which the technology is in use. In situations where small talk and play are essential activities, care workers often prioritize responsiveness to residents rather than making sure that the robot's nature is transparent. In these situations, residents' emotional expressions serve not only as crucial resources for their own sense-making but also as valuable indicators for care workers to comprehend how to navigate care situations.

Welfare technology usually works best when users ignore it, or when they accept the technology’s presence without questioning it. However, this means that users’ integrity and their chance to make an informed consent is put at risk. Based on previous research and original empirical material, this presentation focuses on three examples to specify how this dilemma is materialized in dementia care. First, guidelines emphasize the need for informed consent when it comes to video surveillance, but video surveillance works best when the cameras are ignored. Second, nursing homes often use internet platforms for entertainment purposes and users’ profiles can be highly personalized. However, the algorithms that identify the users’ preferences are usually obscure—to residents as well as to care staff. Third, while robotic animals are increasingly used in dementia nursing homes, guidelines dissuade care staff from leading residents to believe that the robots are real. However, in practice both residents and care staff usually approach the robots as if they were real animals. These challenges concerning deception, transparency and integrity cannot simply be solved through additional information, as people with dementia may already be struggling to understand, and remember, abstract instructions. Deceptive practices in relation to technology is therefore here considered as a form of digital emotional labor through which care staff attempt to bridge the gap between policy and practice. They do so partly in their communication with nursing home residents, and partly through their own reflective practices around these technologies. In conclusion, it is argued that dilemmas connected to welfare technology, and the deceptive practices related to its use, are not built into the technological devices. Instead, deception is a relational phenomenon that emerges from interactions between care staff, residents, and technological artifacts and systems.

Caregivers are dissuaded from using deception in dementia care in Swedish policies. However, guidelines in other countries have a more positive approach to deceptive practices when these are used in the best interest of patients. Research also shows that lies and deception are widely used in dementia care. Based on interviews with caregivers and ethnographic visits to nursing homes in Sweden, this paper examines the use of technology in deceptive practices in the care of people with dementia. Three technological devices are in focus: the online patient journal, the security camera, and the robotic animal. The journal allows for a smooth transition of knowledge between caregivers, enabling a person-centered care. However, the patient is often unaware of this circulation of knowledge by which the patient becomes known to everyone without necessarily knowing anyone. The camera makes it possible for caregivers to watch over patients without having to enter their rooms, which means that they do not have to disturb them with unnecessary and inconvenient visits. Paradoxically, the technology thus breaches the patients’ integrity in order to secure it. Last, the robotic animal works particularly well when it is perceived to be a real animal; yet, both policies and previous research caution against using a robot to create an illusion of a living being. The paper argues that to handle these dilemmas, the devices need to be understood in context: deception is not built into healthcare technology but is instead generated in the relationship between caregiver, patient, and technological device., Presentationen hölls den 13 mars 2024.

Robotic animals are increasingly discussed as a solution to challenges connected to the aging population and limited resources in care. While previous research focuses on the robots’ effect on the patients’ well-being, there is a general lack of knowledge regarding the hands-on experience of caregivers’ use of robots. Therefore, the aim of the study is to explore the competences that caregivers draw upon when facilitating interaction between residents and robots. The study was conducted through ethnographic observations and interviews with caregivers at dementia care homes in Sweden. The notion of ‘competence’ is understood as knowledge about the ways of working and social norms that are valued within a community of practice, which members develop through engagement in the community. The findings show that caregivers’ use of robotic animals as caregiving tools rests on embodied, social, and ethical competences.

Robotic animals in the shape of cats, dogs, and seals are increasingly used in dementia care. The robots are built to respond to users’ touch and talk for various purposes such as calming, activating, or entertaining patients. Drawing on media representations, marketing materials, reports of experts, and interviews with care workers we take a closer look at the ideas of animality that shape the robots and their application in care organizations. We find that the robots’ animality is described as connecting with a fundamental mammal aspect of our humanity. At the same time, concerns are raised that patients risk being dehumanized when robots replace human-to-human interaction, and the robots are thus treated as a threat to patients’ human dignity. The chapter discusses how notions of animality and a biopolitical understanding of the human as mammal play an integral role in robotized care organizations.

Given the emphasis on communication in social work, the empirical study of social work interactions is an important area for research. By examining recordings of naturally occurring social interaction and analysing participants’ practices in close detail, conversation analysis (CA) provides rigorous resources for understanding the practical challenges and opportunities of professional intervention. Since the origins of CA in the 1970s, this approach has been used for investigating interactions in a wide range of institutional domains. Based on articles published in peer-reviewed journals in English, this scoping review maps the development of CA in social work research. The review gives an overview of the institutional contexts, professional groups and client groups that have been investigated using CA methods, as well as how their interactional practices have been examined. We show contributions of CA to understanding social work in terms of specific interactional practices, how practitioners accomplish challenging institutional activities in interactions and how theories and ideals about interactions relate to social work practice. The review highlights research gaps concerning clients’ resources for pursuing agendas, embodied conduct in social work, contributions to the cumulative body of CA research and implications for practice. We discuss these findings in relation to CA as a relatively new approach in social work research and the challenges which CA may need to address to become a more integrated part of social work research and practice.

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.

Despite the lively discussion on the pros and cons of using robots in health care, little is still known about how caregivers are affected when robots are introduced in their work environment. The present scoping review fills this research gap by mapping previous studies about the relation between robots in care and caregivers’ working life. The paper is based on searches in four databases for peer-reviewed articles about robots in care settings, published 2000 to 2020. The 27 included papers were examined with the questions of 1) how robots are used by caregivers, and 2) how robots affect caregivers’ work environment. The analysis shows that the use of robots can affect both the physical and the psychosocial work environment, in positive as well as in negative ways. Robots are used in care settings to reduce physical and mental demands of the caregivers, but they can, in fact, increase caregivers’ workload. Thus, the review indicates that robots can improve the quality of work, but that they seldom work as a shortcut to increased efficiency or time effectiveness.

Katt- och hundrobotar har blivit ett allt vanligare inslag i äldreomsorgen. Robotarna imiterar djurs läten och rörelser och kan användas för att lugna och avleda användare. De kan också användas för att aktivera personer genom att de inbjuder till interaktion mellan vårdtagare, vårdgivare och robot. Robotarna är utvecklade för att skapa en illusion av ett levande djur – en del modeller har ett mekaniskt hjärta som kan kännas genom pälsen, och kattrobotarna kan spinna, med purrande och vibrationer. Det här ställer frågor om transparens och ärlighet på sin spets. Enligt Statens medicinsk-etiska råds riktlinjer ska vårdgivare inte vilseleda patienter om robotarnas egenskaper och kapacitet, eftersom det då gör det omöjligt för patienter att göra ett informerat ställningstagande när de erbjuds att använda robotar. I en pågående studie om sociala robotar i demensvården ser vi dock att det är vanligt att vårdgivare talar om och hanterar robotarna som om de vore verkliga katter och hundar. Genom exempel visar vi hur personalen på detta sätt gör robotarna levande, och hur vårdgivare reflekterar kring sitt sätt att använda robotarna. Ofta är det svårt att dra en skarp gräns mellan sanning och lögn, eftersom personalens agerande ofta handlar om att bekräfta vårdtagares upplevelser. Vi föreslår därför alternativa sätt att förstå det som händer i interaktionen mellan vårdtagare, vårdgivare och robot, för att bidra till en nyanserad diskussion om robotik och vita lögner inom demensvården.

Robotic animals in the shape of cats, dogs and seals have become increasingly popular in dementia care during the last two decades. These robots are used both to make the user calm and passive and to engage users in interactions. Based on ethnography at four nursing homes and in-depth interviews with caregivers, the present study explores the use of white lies in interactions between robots, care recipients and caregivers. Findings suggest that the robots have the greatest impact on users when they believe the animal robots to be real animals. However, according to The Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics, caregivers should not lead users to believe that the robots have capacities that they do not in fact have, and that caregivers should avoid any misconceptions by giving users information about the nature and functions of the robots. We identify three different strategies that caregivers use when using the robots in care practice. First, caregivers make sure to be fully transparent about the robots, and give users straightforward information about the robots’ limited capacities. Second, caregivers can adhere to users’ own misconceptions about the robots. Third, some caregivers simply tell users with severe dementia that the robots are real, and act as if they wore. All approaches involve challenges: when caregivers tell ‘the truth’, users often forget this information, or choose to ignore it and approach the robots as animals. When caregivers follow or support the idea of the robot ‘as real’, this often leads to amplified misconceptions, potentially disproved by relatives. In conclusion, all three strategies risk nourishing white lies, but a special kind of “caring lie” that many interviewed caregivers support.

Among the innovations within health and welfare technology during recent years, robot animals used in dementia care are one of the more debated devices. These robotic cats and dogs, built to respond to sound, movement and touch, are used to calm, activate and entertain users. Concerns have been raised both in scholarly work and in mass media that robots risk dehumanizing care work: if robots replace human beings, patients’ encounters with other humans will be reduced, and the remaining care workers will be turned into robot maintenance staff, rather than doing the care work for which they were hired. In this paper we take a closer look at the ideas of animality that shape the robots and their application in care organizations, and discuss the critique against them. We base this discussion on news articles, marketing materials, and ethnographic work in dementia care that we have conducted in care homes in Sweden. Adopting a posthumanist perspective, we show how the robots’ animality is constructed through the use of culturally rooted conceptions of nonhuman animals. Robotic animals can be seen as materializations of care organizations, as expectations on encounters between patients and caregivers, as well as conceptions of other animals and of basic human needs, are hard-wired into their construction. We also discuss how questions about work environment and human dignity are raised in relation to the implementation of robotic animals. We conclude that while robotic animals may reproduce an anthropocentric understanding of human-animal relations, the manufacturing and consumption of robotic animals can also be seen as a testament of the importance of nonhuman animals in the lives of humans. By asking “And say the animal responded?” Jacques Derrida challenges his readers to take seriously animals’ resistance against humans’ categorizations and metaphorical use of them. Robotic animals are rarely designed to ‘respond’ in Derrida’s sense. “BARKBACK” and “VibraPurr” techn

A person among others? Older people’s understandings of their everyday life during the Covid-19 crisis This article examines how older people make sense of their situation in calls to a helpline a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic. By drawing on the sociology of everyday life to analyse callers’ various understandings of the crisis, the article nuances current knowledge about older people’s situation. The thematic analysis shows that the callers make sense of the crisis linked to social relations on a personal, anonymous, and abstract level. The callers’ responses to challenges to their everyday routines – adjustment or critical evaluation – are connected to different approaches to trust: basic trust in a shared social reality with someone or regulating trust in a set of norms independent from that other. Whereas the calls demonstrate very few positive adjustments in personal relations, they show that anonymous and abstract relations serve as important resources for both maintaining and re-evaluating everyday life during a crisis. Although older people’s lack of secure personal relations during the pandemic points to vulnerability, their resourcefulness is apparent in their active engagement in important anonymous and abstract relations., Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv