Analysing Social Work Communication

With communication and relationships at the core of social work, this book reveals the way it is foremost a practice that becomes reality in dialogue, illuminating some of the profession’s key dilemmas. Applied discourse studies illustrate the importance of talk and interaction in the construction of everyday and institutional life. This book provides a detailed review and illustration of the contribution of discourse approaches and studies on professional interaction to social work. Concentrating on how social workers carry out their work in everyday organisational encounters with service users and colleagues, each chapter uses case studies analysing real-life social work interactions to explore a concept that has relevance both in discursive studies and in social work. The book thus demonstrates what detailed discursive studies on interaction can add to professional social work theories and discussions. Chapters on categorization, accountability, boundary work, narrative, advice-giving, resistance, delicacy and reported speech, review the literature and discuss how the concept has been developed and how it can be applied to social work. The book encourages professional reflection and the development of rigorous research methods, making it particularly appropriate for postgraduate and post-qualifying study in social work where participants are encouraged to examine their own professional practice. It is also essential reading for social work academics and researchers interested in language, communication and relationship-based work and in the study of professional practices more generally.

With communication and relationships at the core of social work, this book reveals the way it is foremost a practice that becomes reality in dialogue, illuminating some of the profession’s key dilemmas. Applied discourse studies illustrate the importance of talk and interaction in the construction of everyday and institutional life. This book provides a detailed review and illustration of the contribution of discourse approaches and studies on professional interaction to social work. Concentrating on how social workers carry out their work in everyday organisational encounters with service users and colleagues, each chapter uses case studies analysing real-life social work interactions to explore a concept that has relevance both in discursive studies and in social work. The book thus demonstrates what detailed discursive studies on interaction can add to professional social work theories and discussions. Chapters on categorization, accountability, boundary work, narrative, advice-giving, resistance, delicacy and reported speech, review the literature and discuss how the concept has been developed and how it can be applied to social work. The book encourages professional reflection and the development of rigorous research methods, making it particularly appropriate for postgraduate and post-qualifying study in social work where participants are encouraged to examine their own professional practice. It is also essential reading for social work academics and researchers interested in language, communication and relationship-based work and in the study of professional practices more generally.

This edited book showcases original research in the study of healthcare and health communication, while also providing a detailed overview of contemporary methods of discourse analysis. Discourse approaches remain under-represented in the field of health communication, despite their potential for affording detailed understanding of health-related text and talk across an array of contexts, for example in face-to-face and digital healthcare encounters, health promotion, and patients’ accounts of illness experiences. This book aims to address this gap in the literature by offering the first book-length treatment of different approaches to discourse analysis in health(care) and illness contexts, and it will appeal both to linguists and to researchers in nursing and health sciences, sociology and anthropology.

This book explores: · What is meant by communication skills · What communication skills are · What they look like in practice · The differences in communicating with service users and professionals, such as children, guardians, peers and emergency workers · Why they are important It includes a wide range of theories, multiple case studies, reflective tasks, and exercises. It will develop your critical thinking and reflection skills, and help you develop your own communication style. Presented in a chronological style which acts as a working tool that you can dip into and out of. Each chapter is structured in a way that encourages you to build on your knowledge, so it begins by taking you right back to basics to learn core theory and practice techniques before getting you to critically reflect on the use of different skills in different settings and with different service user groups. The end-of-chapter skills audits help you to reflect on what you have learnt, what your strengths are and what you need to work on more.

What do the stories youth in state care tell about life in their family of origin? What stories do they tell us about coming into care, living in care, and relationships with foster-parents and social workers? This book presents the stories of youth in care, though not in splendid isolation, but as interactively produced, turn by turn in interviews, and in conversations with other youth. By using tools from conversation analysis (CA), the author examines interviews with youth in care and social workers, to unfold the essential and incorrigible reflexivity of story production. CA allows us to grasp the ways that a youth’s story emerges turn by turn, and is an artefact of a social relation between a youth and an interviewer. This text provides social work readers with a sense of art, artistry, and ambiguity at the heart of social interaction. It will be required reading for all social work students and academics looking for a deeper, more philosophical understanding of the profession.

Based on ethnographic observations of encounters between social workers and people with whom they do not have a shared language, this book analyzes the impact of language discordance on the quality of professional service provision. Exploring how street-level bureaucrats navigate the landscape of these discretionary assessments of language discordance, language proficiency, and the need for interpreting, the book focuses on four main themes: the complexity of social work talk the issue of participation in language discordant meetings communicative interaction the issue of how clarification is requested when needed, and whether professionals and service users are able to reach clarity when something is unclear Based on the findings presented on these different aspects of language discordant talk, the consequences of language discordance for social work are presented and discussed, focusing primarily on issues at the intersection of language, communication, power, dominance and subordination, representation, linguicism, and ultimately, human rights and human dignity. It will be of interest to all social work students, academics and professionals as well as those working in public services and allied health more broadly.

This book offers students a solid grounding in the core knowledge and skills of communication needed for effective practice. It takes the key theories and explains them in a systematic and practice-related way, to help undergraduate and postgraduate students develop a critical understanding of the subject.

This book describes the steps undertaken by language researchers to disseminate their findings at sites of practice. It discusses questions that arise from such efforts and provides meaningful, real-life, first-hand accounts of both interactions with practitioners and practitioners’ feedback. The authors use narrative accounts, case studies, and semi-ethnographies of focus groups and workshops to draw a full picture of dissemination, its intricacies, multiple stakeholder interests, reflexivity challenges, and future relevance and responsibility for all parties involved. It is an attempt to fill the gap between the end of research domains and the places of dissemination of research findings, and the book will be of interest to applied linguistics researchers, students and scholars of organisational discourse, and practitioners working in multilingual settings.

The impetus for this book is the shift in welfare policy in Western Europe from state responsibilities to individual and community responsibilities. The book examines the ways in which policies associated with advanced liberalism and New Public Management can be identified as influencing professional practices to promote personalisation, participation, empowerment, recovery and resilience. In examining the concept of ‘responsibilisation’ from the point of view of both the ‘responsibilised client and welfare worker’, the book breaks from the traditional literature to demonstrate how responsibilities are negotiated during multi-professional care planning meetings, home visits, staff meetings, focus groups and interviews with different stakeholders. The settings examined in the book can be described as on the ‘margins of welfare’ - mental health, substance abuse, homelessness services and probation work, where the rights and responsibilities of clients and workers are uncertain and constantly under review. Each chapter approaches the management of responsibilities from a particular angle by combining responsibilisation theory and discourse analysis to examine everyday encounters. Taken together, the chapters paint a comprehensive picture of the responsibilisation practices at the margins of welfare services and provide an extensive discussion of the implications for policy and practice. Drawing upon both the governmentality literature and everyday encounters, the book provides a broad approach to a key topic. It will therefore be a valuable resource for social policy, public administration, social work and human service researchers and students, and social and health care professionals.

The collection of data sources in the social sciences involves communication in one form or another: between research participants who are observed while communicating or between researcher and researched, who communicate so that the former can learn about/from the latter. How does one analyze communication?