RESEARCH METHODS IN SOCIAL WORK:DESCRIPTIVE AND ANALYTICAL APPROACHES

Discourse and narrative analysis as approach to social work and other ‘third way strategies’

Presentation at University of Iceland, MA in Social Work, May 2nd 2013

Søren Peter Olesen, associate professor, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University

Introductory section

INTRODUCTIONWhat does ’discourse and narrative analysis

and other ’third way strategies’’ refer to?

How to proceed? - The course of the dayNot ’hands on’ – rather methods ’in principle’!But have a try!And apologies for my English as 2nd language!

Background for the presentation• Education, work experience, ’normativity’• Research subjects and methods• Present position at Aalborg University

INTRODUCTION – potentials of social work

To focus on potentials of social work from my point of view implies:

- That social work ’makes a difference’ – or at least may do that

- Neither ’romanticising’ nor ’daemonising’ social work

- We (i.e. I and my research colleagues) have talked about a critical-constructive perspective

- Focusing on room for agency and ’solutions’ as well as critique

- This could be based on actor-network-theory and discourse and narrative analysis (including sociological conversation analysis)

INTRODUCTION – potentials of social work

I see four paradigms of social work research:

• Ethics and values• Effects• Structural frames• As a ’third way’: ’Looking inside professional

practice’ as a ’friendly visitor’, so to speak, without going native, however, and tracing the chains of connections through which social work practice is assembled (cf. Hall & White 2005)

LITERATURE - 1

Brodkin, E. (2012): ”Reflections on Street-Level Bureaucracy: Past, Present and Future”. Public Administraion Review, November/December 2012, 940-949.

Ragin, C. (1994): Constructing social research. The Unity and Diversity of Method. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Especially pp. 47-76.

Olesen, S.P. (2006): “Un-wanted due to Age – Age as a Category in the Experience of Unemployment”. Paper for Workshop 7: Institutional Categorisation in Social Work at FORSA 2006 Conference, Helsinki, February 9th-11th 2006.

Olesen, S.P. & Eskelinen, L. (2011): “Short narratives as a qualitative approach to effects of social work interventions”. Nordic Social Work Research, (1) 1, 61-77.

Fina, A. de and Georgakopoulou, A. (2009) “Annalysing narratives as practices”, Qualitative Research, 8(3), 379-387.

LITERATURE - 2

Hall, C. & S. White (2005): “Looking Inside Professional Practice. Discourse, Narrative and Ethnographic Approaches to Social Work and Counselling”. Qualitative Social Work 4(4), 379-390.

Uggerhøj, L. (2011): ”What is Practice Research in Social Work – Definitions, Barriers and Possibilities”. Social Work and society, 9(1), 45-59.

 Eskelinen, L. S.P.Olesen & D. Caswell (2010): “Client contribution in negotiations on employability – categories revised?”, International Journal of Social Welfare, 19, 330-338.

Caswell, D., L.Eskelinen & S.P. Olesen (2011) Identity work and client resistance underneath the canopy of active employment policy in Qualitative Social Work, 1(01), 1–16.

 Koivisto, J. (2007): ”What evidence base? Steps towards the relational evaluation of social interventions”, i: Evidence & Policy, (no. 4) s. 527 - 537.

OVERVIEW – points to be considered1. Social work as street-level activity / front-

line work2. Investigating similarities and differences

in social work practice3. Combining applied conversation analysis

and narrative analysis in social work research

4. Practice research and research on everyday social work practice

5. Employment-oriented social work as activity-type and professional practice 

6. Metatheoretical reflections 

Section about social work as street-level activity / institutional interaction

SOCIAL WORK AS STREET-LEVEL ACTIVITY - 1

Lipsky, M. (1980): Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service.

 Lipsky’s book was one, and the most outstanding,

among a number of publications adressing the problematics of putting welfare reforms, public policy and professional ideals into practice.

 Just to mention a few:Pressman & Wildawsky (1973) – ImplementaionGrumow (1978) – Alltagskontakte mit der VerwaltungGoodsell (1981) – The Public encounterHasenfeld – Human Service Organisations

SOCIAL WORK AS STREET-LEVEL ACTIVITY - 2

Lipsky’s approach is building on 4 core proposiitons:

• Policy should be understood as indeterminate• Discretionary actions become in effect policy• Discretion is of interest not when random but

when it is structured by factors influencing informal behaviours to develop in systematic ways

• Street-level bureaucracies occupy positions of political significance as an interface between government and the individual

SOCIAL WORK AS STREET-LEVEL ACTIVITY - 3

• A central aspect of Lipsky¨s theory is that street-level bureaucrats due to structures in their work situation develop various coping mechanisms and rationalisations.

• According to Lipsky and research based on his theory street-level bureaucrats rarely act with resistance or in opposition to policy goals; they do not primarily follow personal policy preferences. Their behaviour is rather a matter of adaptions to the conditions of their work situation. They sometimes tell about ’heroic’ efforts to bend the rules.

• Responsiveness is however rather the exception and it might be argued that it is malfunctions of the system that make stories of ’heroic’ effort wanted or at all tell-able.

 

SOCIAL WORK AS STREET-LEVEL ACTIVITY - 4

• Today street-level bureaucracies are supplemented with private organisations and the context of research on street level bureaucracy is contractions and privatisation of wellfare arrangements

• The headline is New Public Management (i.e. the introduction of market mechanisms and private sector management thinking in the public sector, including e.g. performance management and focus on accountability), including performance measurement 

• One major problem is that a number of studies show that this development is followed by increased inequality

SOCIAL WORK AS STREET-LEVEL ACTIVITY - 5

• The project of street-level analysis as part of a project of improvement

• Policymakers and managers might benefit from adopting what Brodkin calls an enabling (rather than controlling) approach that is focused on creating conditions that facilitate quality and responsiveness in policy delivery

• Brodkin recommends caution as regards the rush to advance NPM reforms. Performance measurement can be a valuable tool for monitoring aspects of practice. But its selectivity is both its strength and its weakness. One get what one measures, but this may come with unmeasured consequences of equal or even greater importance. Better performance scores do not necessarily indicate improvement.

DISCUSSION

• What kind of thinking and what type of knowledge is predominant in social work in Iceland?

• What is the main discourse among you?

 

DISCUSSIONIs it ’going by the book’? – i.e. acting according to:

• Law• Administrative aims/criteria and managerial guidelines• Professional ethics and standards

Is it reflecting critically over inequality, social problems and the failures as regards social policy and social work to improve conditions for the poor?

Is it acting according to the best available knowledge? And what is considered to be the best available knowledge?

Is it acting according to what is known (tacitly or explicitly) among peers and reflecting upon experience?

Is it doing what is best for the client according to involvement and negotiation with him/her?

Is it ’muddling through’ from situation to situation?Is it something else?

3 or 4 basic types of knowledge related to social workSocial work is basically:• Intervention in people’s lives and the very central point of

knowledge about social work is knowledge about the effect of the intervention

• Institutional activity and basically central knowledge about social work is knowledge about the problem identities and the solution strategies that are institutionally available

• Contextualised professional activity in order to transform aspects of social life and the central knowledge accordingly is knowledge about social problems and about professional conceptions about generative mechanisms in the production af solutions to social problems

• Assembling specific, often problematic, aspects of social life. Assemling social life involves a complex handling of actors and artefacts in hybrid metworks. Knowledge bout relations and translations is central – HOW TO STUDY THIS?

STUDYING INSTITUTIONAL INTERACTION

Section about designing social work research and about social research as an on-going dialogue between ideas and evidence

INVESTIGATING SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN SOCIAL WORK

Among many different strategies of social research Ragin emphasizes three very broad approaches:

• The use of qualitative methods to study commonalities

• The use of comparative methods to study diversity, i.e. similarities and differences

• The use of quantitative methods to study relationships among variables

Across various strategies ’case of what?’ is a central question

THE GOALS AND STRATEGIES OF SOCIAL RESEARCH

Qualitative research

Comparative research

Quantitative research

Identifying broad patterns

secondary primary

Testing/refining theory

secondary secondary primary

Making predictions

secondary primary

Interpreting significance

primary secondary

Exploring diversity

secondary primary secondary

Giving voice primary

Advancing new theories

primary primary secondary

RESEARCH AS AN ONGOING DIALOGUE BETWEEN IDEAS AND EVIDENCE

IDEAS / SOCIAL THEORY /

ANALYTIC FRAMES (by case/aspect) /

REPRESENTATIONS OF SOCIAL LIFE

/ IMAGES (of cases/aspects)

/ EVIDENCE / DATA

Design – Problem-Based Learning

Section about discourse and narrative analysis, including sociological conversation analysis

Overview of the section about conversation analysis

• An example: Harassment in action• Introduction• The theoretical tradition from which CA as

research methodology derives.• The analytical specifics of CA• The type of research questions, CA can answer• What makes CA unique compared to other

discourse and narrative analytic methodologies?

• Concluding remarks

Harassment in action

MP: … When shall we go for a ride then.(.)

Girl: What did you say.MP: When shall we go for a ride.

(.)Girl: Hey listen I don’t k_now_hhh

(.)MP: h What?

(0.6)MP: Are you coming with me then.

(0.5)MP: Do you dare to come.Girl: <I don ’t know. HhhMP: But come along,

(0.6)Girl: Why is that

Harassment in action… underpinning her (Tainio 2003) analysis is

an attempt to show how actions which can be heard as a form of harassment (and, indeed, which did come to be heard that way by the jury, journalists and the public at large) are predicated on, mobilised in and resisted through mundane practices of interactional organisation. And in this Tainio makes a significant contribution, because she shows that it is possible to develop a conversation analytic account of the infrastructure of sexual harassment.

(Wooffitt 2005)

Introducing conversation analysis – central in discourse and narrative analysis CA is about ‘what comes after what’ in talk-in-interaction

(Antaki 1994:69)According to CA participants orient to interaction (Heritage

1997:162):• Addressing themselves to the immediately preceding

talk; talk is context-shaped• Projecting some next action; talk is context-shaping• Showing an understanding of what is going on; talk

represents sequential intersubjectivity categorisation and narrative

CA is dedicated empirical/’objectivistic’ and qualitative

Two tracks in CA (ten Have 1999:8: at least two kinds of conversation analytical research going on today):

• The institutions of social interaction• The social institutions in talk-in-interaction. ‘Applied’ CA

The ’birth’ of CA

Data: Taperecordings of telephone calls to a help-line at a psychiatric hospital (Sacks 1992a+b)

(1)A: HelloB: Hello

(2) A: This is Mr Smith may I help youB: Yes, this is Mr Brown

(3)A: This is Mr Smith may I help youB: I can’t hear youA: This is Mr SmithB: Smith

The ’birth’ of CA

Data: Talk in therapeutic settings. Turn-taking – example of a ’list’ and of collectively produced talk:

Therap: Bob this is uh MelBob: HiTh: JoeBob: HiJoe: HiTh: HenryHenry: HiBob: HiTh: Bob ReedJoe: We were in an automobile discussionHenry: discussing the psychological motives forMel: drag racing on the streets

(Lectures on Conversation 1:136)

The ’birth’ of CA

Data: Talk in social work setting. Turn-taking; categorisation and category bound activities; narrative; ’objects’ and ’machinery producing that kind of objects’

A: Yeah, then what happened?B: Okay, in the meantime she <the wife of B> says:

“Don’t ask the child nothing.” Well, she stepped between me and the child, and I got to walk out the door. When she stepped between me and the child, I went to move her out of the way. And then about that time her sister had called the police. I don’t know how she … what she …

A: Didn’t you smack her one?B: No.A: You’re not telling me the story, Mr. B.B: Well, you see when you say smack you mean hit.A: You shoved her. Is that it?B: Yeah, I shoved her(Lectures on Conversation 1:113)

Theoretical tradition

• A functional conception of language (Wittgenstein 1953): Language as performative and functional; language as constructive and constitutive of social life (Rapley 2007); using language producing a world of communicative practice

• Inductive, qualitative and ‘objectivistic’ (Sacks 1992)• Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967; 2002) Focus on

member’s rather than researchers’ knowledge and methods• Interaction ritual / interaction order (Goffman 1967; 1983)

reproducing vs. softening and loosening structural traits• ‘Objects’ and ‘devices’; the machinery producing them; a

‘social microphysics’; sequentiality and categorisation; ‘inference-making machine’ (Sacks 1992)

• ‘What comes after what’, not letting an a priori theoretical framework ‘colonise’ description and analysis How members ‘assemble the social’ (Schegloff 1999)

Theoretical relevance

Focus on ‘What comes after what’ (Antaki) How members ‘assemble the social’ (Latour 2005) and categorisation, positioning and rhetoric – rather than on causal explanations and sociological theory about actors and their motives, dispositions and positions

Focus on the situational and the situated (Goffman 1983) Situation, disposition, position (Mouzelis 1995)

Social constructionism (Burr 1995) questioning everything we might take for granted, however not departing from a specific critical theory and an emancipatory project

Critical realism (Archer 1995): Generative mechanisms (Pawson & Tilley 1997) producing the social; structure vs. agency; devices vs. interaction and relations

META-THEORETICAL POSITION• Ontology: a world consisting of

communicative practices• Epistemology: the knowledge and

methods produced and used by members; ’objectivity’

• Methodology: Qualitative (and qualtitative), authentic data, specific and clear procedures (strength and weakness)

• Nomativity: Description and analysis before explanation and evaluation

Research questions

The type of research questions, CA (and discourse and narrative analysis) can answer:

• Why that now? – in the sense that members look at things

• How rather than why?• How is this done in this case, in this situation,

this time?• How this is perceived from from a participant’s

point of view?

Analytical specifics - 1

The analytical specifics of CA: Ways of making available and of making up existing materials (rather than researcher-generated) for analytical purposes (Flick quoted in Rapley 2007)

Analytical specifics - 2

Institutions of social interaction: Seeking ‘universal’ or general rules about talk-in-ineraction, e.g.:

• Turn-taking, sequentiality and turn-design• Pairs• Preference• Repair• Openings• Closings• …

Analytical specifics - 3

Social institutions in interaction / Institutional talk: Applying CA on particular cases of talk-in-interaction; institutional interaction, e.g. education and pedagogy, health and social care, social welfare and employment

Institutional interaction is normally characterised by (Heritage 1997:163f):

• Specific goal orientations• Special constraints on what is considered

allowable contributions• Particular inferential frameworks and procedures

CA and other discourse analytical methodologies

Various selected approaches to the analysis of institutional interaction:• Institutional ethnography• Ethnomethodology and Conversation

Analysis• Sociolinguistics and pragmatics• Critical Discourse Analysis(Sarangi & Roberts 1999)

CA and other discourse analytical methodologies

CA (and partly DA) focuses on language use, everyday interaction whether mundane or institutional, authentic data triviality?

Recordings (sound or video) of verbal communication

CA’s empirical strengths!?

(Wooffit 2005:88)

CA and narrative analysis

The development in narrative analysis

Grand narrativesAbout a nation or ethnic group, about the role of a social class,

a political organisation or a specific way of organising society etc.

Big (biographical) narrativesAbout the life history of an individualSmall narrativesAd hoc positioning in everyday settings, moves taken in

concrete present situations vis-à-vis others, often unnoticed as narratives

From grand/big to smal narratives and from structure to interaction

CA and narrative analysis

“‘Big Stories’, i.e., life stories or autobiographies, or at least stories of life determining (or threatening) episodes have come to take the center stage in narrative studies in the human sciences. ‘Big Stories’ are typically stories that are elicited in interview situations, either for the purpose to create research data or to do therapy – stories in which speakers are asked to retrospect on particular life-determining episodes or on their lives as a whole, and tie together events into episodes and episodes into a life story, so that something like ‘a life’ can come “to existence”. Situations, I will argue, in which ‘Big Stories’ are constructed, are particular kinds of occasions in which speakers have been provided with a particular opportunity for reflection; occasions in which they have been lured or seduced into a particular type of accounting practice (also often called ‘disclosure’); occasions to which the participants have agreed, but occasions that are also quite different from situations in which “small stories” emerge.“

(Bamberg 2006, s. 2-3)

CA and narrative analysis

“…the term “small stories” is meant to refer to stories told in interaction; stories that do not necessarily thematize the speaker, definitely not a whole life, but possibly not even events that the speaker has lived through – and now, retrospectively, reflects upon and recounts (often termed “personal stories” or “narratives of personal experience”). Rather, “small stories” are more the kinds of stories we tell in everyday settings (not just research or therapeutic interviews). And these stories are most often about very mundane things and everyday occurrences, often even not particularly interesting or tellable; stories that seem to pop up, not necessarily even recognized as stories, and quickly forgotten; nothing permanent or of particular importance – so it seems.”

(Bamberg 2006, s. 1-2)

Uniqueness

In sum: What makes CA unique compared to other discourse analytic methodologies?

Talk-in-interactionTurn-taking and sequentialityCategorisation and narrative in

interactionExisting materialsSpecific analytic procedures

Transcriptions of data

Authentic data from concrete situationsSound or video-recordingsThe words as spokenSounds that are utteredInaudible or un-understandable sounds and

sectionsPauses / silencesOverlapping talk and soundsTempo, intonation, strengthFormat of transcriptionAddition of visible informationTranslationSelection, ’cases of what?’(Ten Have 1999; Nielsen & Nielsen 2005)

Concluding remarks 1

Concluding remarks:

• Critique and discussion• The Sacks-heritage (Silverman 1998)• The short-sightedness of CA!? (Wetherell 1998;

Schegloff 1998; Billig 1999; Schegloff 1999; Scheuer 2005; Kjærbeck 2008)

• Immediate vs. mediate contexts (Schegloff 1997; Linell 1998; Erickson 2004)

• CA and other discourse analytical methodologies (Wooffitt 2005; Rapley 2007)

• CA and narrative analysis

Concluding remarks 2

Concluding remarks:

CA and e.g. social work research; a profound relevance associated with social work and counselling as authentic communicative practice / language use / language games; a conflation of activity types and discourse types (Sarangi 2000)

Reservations:

• What is actually turns and how do you observe turns; is there a ’nano-physics’and a ’meso-physics’ of interaction?

• At a mezo- and macro-level: the occurrence and character of turns not lying immediately close to each other as well as the occurrence and character of monological traits

• The characterisation of everyday life as primordial and immortal and as realised in comunicative practice including assumptions dialogue, equality, reciprocity and balance is problematic; interaction is allways embedded and social institutions maybe allways present

Two extracts illustrating resistance

Extract 1

C: You promised me. I am not going to take antabuse. There is nothing to do about it.

SW: No, no.C: I have been through that a 117 times, and I can’t bear it. There is

nothing to do.SW: C <name of client>, listen to me. It is not the first and

foremost duty of B <name of alcohol treatment specialist> to fill you with antabuse. That’s up to you.

C: No. Because I’m not going to do that.SW: No.C: You might just as well use them to … to light the fire in the

fireplace, man.SW: Yes, but that is not at all the question.C: That’s how poisonous it is. It is much more poisonous than alcohol.SW: Try to listen here, my friend. It is not a question about that.

That’s not what we are going to do.C: It is pure sulphur.

Extract 2

SW: That is not at all what we are going to do. What we are going to use B <name of alcohol treatment specialist/social worker?> for is to obtain a description/clarification of, whether you shall be able to receive alcohol treatment or not, and whether you shall be able to get something out of it. We, you and I, might agree on beforehand that you cannot. However, we just need to get some other clever people to wright it down, also, in order to convince the municipal medical adviser <sociallæge>. Because she is not an alcohol treatment specialist, you know. But, that’s what we need to have, and that’s what we are going to use B <name of alcohol treatment specialist> for. And the, they are really such nice people down there, and they offer you coffee and things like that down there.

C: Yeaahh. I get that here too, you know, also very nice place. But … now, listen to me … since the time …

SW: When the King of Diamonds was a Knight and wore short trousers

Extract 2 - continued

…C: And you nearly even weren’t born yet … erm … it is over 25

years ago …SW: Yes, I know that very well, C <name of client>.C: … that the boy <whistling sound> disappeared together with

the mother. Since then I have been on this, and I have been on all possible, odd alcohol-hubbob-things, even at that place on <road where the alcohol treatment unit is placed> and at my own doctor several times and things like that. And you know what … you must not …

SW: Yes, but I know this very well C <name of client>. However, we need to get this kind of documentation. And the good thing about B <name of alcohol treatment unit> is then that this is not a place where you have to meet at seven o’clock in the morning. And it’s only two times a week.

Discussion

• Is it important to study language use, or are the most important things happening, so to speak, behind the back of the participants in social work practice?

• What do you think?

A few comments on practice research

PRACTICE RESEARCH• Research that focuses on what is actually going on in

the concrete practice of professional social workers and other agents producing / constructing that practice (Hall & White 2005)

• Research that focuses on collaboration between practice and research (approach A) is defined as practice research (Uggerhøj 2011; cf. The ’science of the concrete’ and the distinction between techne, episteme and phronesis; Flyvbjerg 2001)

• Research that focuses on processes controlled and accomplished by practitioners (approach B) is defined as practitioner research (Ramian 2003, 2009)

• Research that focuses on user participation in the research process is defined as user- controlled research.

PRACTICE RESEARCHUggerhøj (2011):

Just as social sciences have not contributed much to explanatory and predictive theory, neither have the natural sciences contributed to reflexive analysis and discussion of values and interests, which is the prerequisite for an enlightened political, economic, and cultural development in any society, and which is at the core of phronesis (Flyvbjerg 2001:3).

From this position, practice research may very well be a way to transform phronetic social science into everyday practice as well as phronetic social science constituting both a theoretical and a methodological framework for practice research in social work.

Section about employment-oriented social work

Case study of content and consequences of employment efforts from the perpective of cash benefit recipients

• What changes in their situation do benefit recipients experience in the course of the employment efforts and through their contact with case workers? Do contacts with the employment service, the content of the contact and the efforts that are provided, make a difference for benefit recipients? Can this be traced in their narratives?

• What kind of research methodology could be developed as a relevant strategy for data collection and analysis covering the benefit recipients’ perspective on the consequences of the employment effort?

• (Eskelinen & Olesen 2010)

Benefit recipients’ perspective on efforts and consequences• A case study of a limited number of benefit recipients,

intensively following their experiences at job centres and outside administrative contexts

• The study was conducted over a period of one year, and included nineteen long-term cash benefit recipients from two municipalities

• Different data types were combined. The primary material is composed of interviews with benefit recipients, observation of their interaction with case workers and other professionals + interviews with case workers. Even written material was collected.

• A narrative approach, examining the benefit recipients’ point of view based on their narratives of how they saw their situation in relation to the labour market, their problems other than unemployment, the employment effort they had been and still were part of, and the ways in which the effort was applied to them

ANALYTICAL FRAME -1• The frame of reference of the cash benefit recipient at the

beginning of the follow-up period: Working life perspective; how the unemployed regards him/herself in relation to the labour market and participation in working life; earlier experiences; the situation here and now; ideas about future working life participation

• The sequence of events during the follow-up period: How the cash benefit recipient experience employment efforts over time; the perception of the choice and design of the employment effort as well as of the initiatives of the employment system

• Contexts that are referred to: Opportunities and hindrances associated with the employment measures brought up; resources and barriers in the situation of the unemployed

•  

ANALYTICAL FRAME - 2

• The development in work identity and agency: Changes in the narratives of the social welfare recipients about their attitude towards working life participation; specific changes related to work

• Connections between ’treatment’ and consequences to the unemployed including the central point in the narratives of the social welfare recipient: The specific content of the ’treatment’ selected for the unemployed in question and the coupling of this with specific consequences of the measures from the point of view of the unemployed. A central formulation of the main point of a specific case, e.g. a clear goal or intention, or on the contrary a lacking clarification or even hopelessness

References

• Olesen, S.P., L. Eskelinen og D. Caswell (2005): Faglighed i socialt arbejde som forskningsgenstand – et kritisk konstruktivt perspektiv. akf working paper (www.akf.dk/workingpaper)

• Eskelinen, L., D. Caswell og S.P. Olesen (2006): En kritisk konstruktiv tilgang til faglighed i socialt arbejde.Tidsskrift for Arbejdsliv 8 (1): 82-95

• Eskelinen, L., S.P. Olesen og D. Caswell (2008): Potentialer i socialt arbejde – et konstruktivt blik på faglig praksis. København: Hans Reitzels Forlag

• Eskelinen, L., S.P. Olesen og D. Caswell (2010): “Client contribution in negotiations on employability: categories revised?” International Journal of Social Welfare, 19(3), 330-338.

• Olesen, Søren Peter and Eskelinen, Leena (2009): Korte narrativer i analyser af beskæftigelsesindsatser. Tidsskrift for Arbejdsliv 11(4): 38-51.

• Eskelinen, Leena and Olesen, Søren Peter (2010): Beskæftigelsesindsatsens indhold og konsekvenser set fra kontanthjælpsmodtagernes perspektiv. AKF Workingpaper. København: AKF. Download: www.akf.dk

• Olesen, Søren Peter and Eskelinen, Leena (2011): Effects of social work: A qualitative approach. Nordic Social Work Research, 1(1) – submitted.

Connections between efforts and consequences in case AA• Dental treatment; substance abuse treatment

(improved health, self-respect, daily life) the possibility of/interest in planning the future more than one day ahead ready to look for a job employment with wage subsidy

• Previous rejection of application for dental treatment deterioration in a ’vicious circle’ (increased substance abuse, toothache, feeling down, absence from job training) increased distance from labour market ; concern about possible damage to own health and mental well-being

• (AA emphasises the contact with his case worker, but is ambivalent about the substance abuse treatment: was it necessary for changing his life situation or simply a means to get free dental treatment?)

Short narratives about work identity – examples from the case BB• ‘At that time <by the beginning of the mandatory activation> I

had no ideas about on-the-job training. That about remittance of debts was the thing that inspired me to, that now it made sense to get out of the system.’

’I can say it in two ways. The course of events at K <activation project> has been fine. It has of course been a little rough, but you get accustomed to that. But it has been fine to get away from home somewhat, because the place where I came to, it was somehow people that were similarly disposed (illness and stress among others); many ‘models’; and you could choose many different things. – That’s if I look at it from the outside. – However, if I look at myself personally, then I think it was infuriating; it was simply too rude; it was too much; because, well I have taken care of my son; he has schizophrenia, but he is not dangerous or something. I have been allowed to take care of him for 5 years.’ … ‘I felt I had made an agreement with them.’

Three concluding points - 1Benefit recipients’ knowledge of the efforts and their consequences• The study offers qualitative information on effects of employment

efforts.• This information includes useful knowledge about programme

effects, the professional praxis of front-line staff, and participation by benefit recipients

• The analyses show that if such knowledge is ignored, there is a danger of ignoring not only important potentials, but also important barriers to the achievement of desired results from the efforts

• This knowledge – of the fact that in every new situation an adaptation or translation of the efforts to the specific circumstances takes place – has significance for the action to be taken; it is possessed primarily by the actors directly involved in the employment efforts

• The benefit recipients’ narratives provide us not only with summary statements on how public service is generally perceived, but also with detailed descriptions and assessments of the significance of specific employment efforts in relation to specific issues

Three concluding points - 2

The actors’ role and the design of the efforts• Examination of the benefit recipients’ narratives demonstrates

that the quality of relations in the front line is very important; the efforts are formed by the actors

• This is based upon a view of efforts and their consequences that differs from the usual view, in which efforts are regarded as effective or not effective

• To use a common metaphor, we enter the “black box” between the input of a given intervention and the output that it produces. Efforts and effects in the present context are entities that are not given in advance, but come into being and develop and have consequences over time

• This takes place through processes, mechanisms and relations that include both human actors and a number of other circumstances and factors

• The primary actors in the efforts, including in particular the benefit recipients, are seen in this perspective not primarily as objects (of management), but as co-constructors or co-producers of the efforts

Three concluding points - 3Short narratives combined with relational evaluation as an

approach• Central to the study’s delineation of a qualitative effect

concept is a narrative approach: SHORT NARRATIVES OF WORK IDENTITY

• A type of knowledge that is missed by the usual studies and understandings of effects, a knowledge that is important from the point of view of the individual and the professional as well as from the management perspective

• The short narratives are both identity markers and sources to the content and consequences of the employment efforts

• Focusing on the benefit recipients’ point of view has confirmed that the content and consequences of the employment efforts form chains of connections through which actors are assembling the elements of the efforts into specific progressions, which sometimes maintain the status quo, but sometimes even involve change

Conclusions about content and consequences of employment efforts

• A prerequisite for a successful effort seems to be that the employment service includes the benefit recipients’ knowledge and engage in mutual interaction with them

• The contact between the benefit recipients and the representatives of the employment service is therefore crucial in relation to how efforts eventually function in terms of the benefit recipients’ participation and collaboration

• When these elements are present, employment efforts can be the beginning of constructive processes with possibly quite considerable impact on benefit recipients’ prospects and perspectives as regards work

Concluding:

Meta-theory and methodology

CONCLUSION – metatheory and methodology

Metatheory and methodology in social work research:

• What kind of phenomena? Realism vs. constructivism; structures and mechanisms vs. networks and relations Ontology

• What type of knowledge? Dualism vs. monism; causality vs. imitation Epistemology

• What kind of research? - Design, data and analysis. Priority to authentic data Methodology

• Cui bono? / Whose interest? Critique vs. focus on solutions. A critical-constructive perspective Normativity