2021 Conference

Introduction to the day

Digital housekeeping and participation

Accomplishing child protection assessments: the interactional production of moral objects in projecting institutional futures

Our presentation describes the sequential and categorical methods which accomplish-in-use the ‘work objects’ of child protection assessments. In doing so, we recover the situated methods of assessment in child protection and, specifically, the accomplishment of ‘moral objects’ in relation to local interactional possibilities and institutional futures. Moral objects describe one set of methods that social workers use to bring about trajectories of “parental transformation” over the course of a case. Moral objects gloss the social workers’ introduction of categorial items, at particular moments in the assessment, to be negotiated by the service user; that is, for them to deny, accept, or display remorse. Significantly, we suggest that these moral objects, whilst locally accomplished and negotiated, are embedded within an extended institutional temporality, glossed as ‘the case’, and thus serve as ‘objectivated’ work items for charting parental transformation. Our research draws on fieldnote data and recordings from a larger ethnographic study of child protection practice that describes a series of practices central to ‘fixing change’ in social work, tied to the project of the objectivation of selves and, significantly, as organised in and through the membership category device ‘family’. The project draws on Lieberman’s (2018) work on objectivation practices, extending it to professional work where accounts of human change and identity are the primary work object. The data set includes observations of social work with six families over the course of a year and demonstrates how ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography can provide for the observation and description of how social workers, in and through situated methods, accomplish accountable change, or lack thereof, over time. We draw on membership categorisation analysis to describe social workers’ use of moral objects to accomplish professional assessments. Our key finding is that social workers have orderly methods for co-producing knowledge in assessment, namely via placing different forms of moral object ‘on the table’, to see what work parents do with them. We show how a failure to ‘pick up’ moral objects from the categorical table, presents an accountable matter for the social worker, indicating how forms of acknowledgement, or lack thereof, of these items as moral objects has interactional and institutional consequences. We also show how moral objects are used to account for in situ assessments and decisions, however small, relating to a clients categorial status, character, capacity for engagement and change, and projected institutionalised futures. In closing, we note how rather than instrumentally utilising taught communication ‘skills’, social workers methods of charting parental change are accomplished through situationally specific situated category practices, with interactional and institutional consequences.

Presence vs participation in interaction in child protection conferences

Child protection policy in England emphasises the importance of participation and partnership with parents. In this paper, we zoom in on a key event in the child protection process, the child protection conference, in order to explore parental and professional participation from an interactional perspective. We draw on audio-recordings of child protection conferences which formed part of a wider English study of child protection social work. Taking an Interactional Sociolinguistics approach and drawing on CA research, we focus on account sequences relating to concerns about children to illuminate how parent involvement is accomplished interactionally. We look specifically at the linguistic and discursive features of turns and the management of the floor, connecting the sequential nature of the account sequences to presence and participation. Our findings raise questions about whether parents can be deemed to be fully participating in these meetings as our data show a contrast between professionals’ participation versus parents’ presence in this asymmetrical event. The analysis suggests a marginalisation of the parents’ contribution in the event which has significant consequences for the in situ negotiation of child protection and the ideology of participation and partnership with parents.

Managing children's attempts at obtaining attention in Social Work encounters

This study investigates the local organization of ‘choreographies of attention’ (Tulbert & Goodwin, 2011) in adult-child interactions taking place in Social Work encounters to which clients have taken their young children for practical reasons which are not related to the issues under discussion. While professional and parent(s) accomodate the presence of a child sitting at the table where the encounter takes place, they rarely address them as a participant in their own right., leaving it to the child to silently observe the conversation between the adults, play with small objects on the table or, in some cases, attempt to get attention from the adults. Resulting in a reconfiguration of the ‘interactional space’ (Mondada, 2013), children’s attempts at getting attention from adults (see Butler & Wilkinson, 2013) may cause the latter to temporarily suspend the main activity, i.e. talking about clients’ cases, in order to address the child’s verbal and/or embodied requests (see Cekaite, 2016; Kidwell, 2005; Wootton, 1981). While the contingent emergence of such sequences may disrupt the progression of the encounter, it may also provide important opportunities for addressing children’s concerns and promote their partipation and inclusion in the encounter in course (see Gan & Danby, 2021; Goodwin, 2006; Hutchby & O’Reilly, 2010) and, moreover, offer social workers an opportunity to observe how clients interact with their children, hence providing important information about the specificities of the family and the interactional dynamics between its members. Proceeding within the framework of Conversation Analysis, the present study is grounded by a corpus of audiovisual recordings of Social Work encounters in four social intervention institutions in Portugal (n=48, 22 hours approx.). A fine-grained sequential and multimodal analysis of participants’ audible and visible conduct (see Mondada, 2016) shows how, within the course of an encounter at hand, a child may attempt to obtain the adults’ attention, through verbal or bodily actions, and how parents and/or social workers manage such attempts by addressing the child’s concerns or minimizing its disruption of the main activity. This study aims to further contribute to a multimodal approach to conversation analytical research on Social Work (see Monteiro, 2019; Rawls et al, 1997) and, more specifically, shed light on the practical challenges and opportunities occasioned by adult-child interactions in Social Work encounters and its affordances for promoting inclusion, participation and socialization of the latter

Breakout rooms

Jump in and out of rooms, each hosted by a CASW member, meet over coffee

Plenary: Giving and resisting advice

Lunchbreak

De-gendering parents: Welfare professionals’ use of non-gendered references in interactions with clients

This study uses conversation analysis to examine the use of non/gendered third-person references in 378 email exchanges between social insurance officers and parents in Sweden. Swedish equality-promoting strategies include developing a gender-inclusive institutional language. This is visible in published documents and brochures, but little is known about its application in interaction with clients. The analysis in this study shows that social insurance officers pervasively use non-gendered references (e.g., ‘the other parent’ or ‘the parent giving birth’ rather than ‘the mother’) where gender is unknown and in instances where parents themselves have already used a gendered reference. In contrast to Kitzinger (2005), we thus find that institutional representatives work to avoid heteronormative presuppositions. However, opting for less specific terms than clients themselves use diverges from how reference in conversation typically works and we suggest that gender-neutral language in this form may come at the cost of formality and de-personalization. We discuss what effect the textual format of email interaction may have and point to the importance of comparative studies between talk- and text-in-interaction

Being personal: Affordances and risks in online suicide helpline counselling

Computer mediated communication has the potential to make social work practice more cost-effective and accessible to clients. However, researchers and policy-makers have raised concerns about online communication in social work, for example, whether it is possible to establish a working alliance between social workers and clients in online communication. Conversation analytic studies have shown that computer mediated interactions require practitioners to use new strategies, for example in accomplishing active listening and in closing a chat conversation. The current presentation adds to this research by using CA in a study of online suicide helpline interactions in Sweden. By analyzing instances when the practitioners disclose personal information, the paper demonstrates how such disclosures can work to display experiential expertise and personal investment in clients’ situation. However, because online interaction does not allow participants to closely attend to each other’s turns-in-progress, self-disclosure also runs the risk of moving the interaction from the clients’ experiential domain to the practitioners’. Besides contributing to the growing conversation analytic research on online communication, the presentation adds to social work research and practice by detailing how practitioners can work to build connection with their clients in suicide prevention

Persuasion in practice: managing diverging stances in assessment meetings with older couples living with dementia

This presentation demonstrates how social workers in needs assessment meetings balance divergent stances in older couples living with dementia who are applying for services from elder care. The Swedish Social Services Act stipulates an individual perspective with self-determination, and in Sweden, relatives or a proxy lacks formal rights to intrude on the persons with dementia’s right to self-determination in decisions about care services. However, at the same time social services shall offer support to family members who care for a close relative. In the study we benefit from conversation analysis when analysing 18 needs assessment meetings with couples from four municipalities in Sweden. The findings suggest that the social workers use different approaches to handle resistance and accomplish persuasion in the needs assessment process. The different approaches were to ‘forming an alliance in favour of the proposal’, ‘providing more information about the proposal’, ‘mitigating the proposal’, ‘positive framing of the proposal’ and ‘laying down conditions for the proposal’. The findings add to the critical debate on how social workers use discretion when constrained by institutional logics. Relational competence is needed to balance and coordinate supported decision making when assessing the needs of older couples living with dementia.

Data sessions

Breakout rooms

Jump in and out of rooms, each hosted by a CASW member, meet over coffee

Facilitating disclosures of violence in child maintenance cases

This paper uses conversation analysis to examine 671 calls to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA), where separated parents raise concerns related to child maintenance. Parents in Sweden must sort out maintenance themselves but the SSIA can intervene if there is a history of domestic violence that make contact problematic. Where this is the case, the abused parent must disclose it to the SSIA officer. Our analysis shows that parents’ descriptions tend to be implicit and non-specific, which confirms what previous research in other institutional settings has found (Tennent & Weatherall 2019). In our data, orientations to violence are built in a step-wise manner, incrementally adding information that makes violence inferentially available. In most cases, however, call-takers respond minimally and do not treat violence as relevant, and callers must do considerable work to establish it as such. In the few instances where call-takers ask about violence, it is done with a preference for denial, placing additional burden on callers. Our findings highlight the need for training, both in recognizing variations of domestic violence and for developing communication skills relevant for facilitating disclosures

“Do you want to just give me an update?” Opening sequences in social work supervision meetings

Much of the work that social workers undertake day-to-day is accomplished through talking. These conversations happen with clients, with other professionals, and between social workers themselves. One important forum where social workers talk amongst themselves is in formal supervision meetings. This study explored supervision interactionally, by asking how social workers and supervisors use their talk to ‘do’ supervision. The study used Conversation Analysis (CA) to analyse a sample of ten audio recordings from a previous study (Wilkins et al. 2020). The analytic focus narrowed from supervisory meetings as a whole to exploring how participants negotiate the beginning of supervision. The study found that supervision meetings in this sample: began with an update, usually requested by the supervisor and provided by the social worker; that this ‘update sequence’ was treated as normative by participants; and that the way supervisors packaged their update requests influenced what social workers produced in response. These findings suggest that a key function of the update sequence might be interactional: participants developed alignment through talk by using the update sequence to ‘get on the same page’ at the beginning of the meeting. These findings have implications for training supervisors and how we conceptualise supervision practice more broadly

Wrap up, stay and chat with the speakers

Including CASW next activities, affiliation.

Ends