A Role for Anyone? A Description of Social Work with the Elderly in Two Area Offices

Summary This article analyses information from Case Review Forms completedby social workers on 199 allocated elderly clients. These peoplewere very frail, most were considered to be ‘at risk’and to require regular, reliable and frequent care. The questionof the client moving to a tafer setting arose in two-thirdsof the cases, concerning which there was often some dispute.It is argued that social workers require a high level of professionalskill in dealing with clients, and others involved, faced withsuch questions and that this requirement will remain with thedevelopment of ‘community social work’.     

'Low Key Practices' in Social Work. Towards a Socio-historical Method

Summary In this article a ‘socio-historical’ method of analysisand intervention in social work will be developed, illustratedby an example drawn from social work with families, the programknown in France as Action Educative en Milieu Ouvert. Our purposeis to support and encourage what we call ‘low key practices’,which refers to practices in which social workers within theexisting structures of so-called ‘individual social work’attempt to explain the social struggle taking place in the situationsthey are dealing with.     

Care Management and Professional Autonomy: The Impact of Community Care Legislation on Social Work with Older People

Correspondene to Mark Lymbery, Centre for Social Work, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. e-mail: Mark_Lymbery{at}nottingham.ac.uk Summary The 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act appearedto herald a new dawn for social work with older people, whichhad previously been a relatively neglected and undervalued areaof social work practice. The legislation proposed a new rolefor social workers as ‘case managers’, with considerableautonomy and flexibility about the way in which the ‘casemanager’ responded to need. By the time community carepolicy was implemented, the role of ‘case manager’had been transformed into that of ‘care manager’,with a focus which emphasized procedural and managerial requirementsrather than a more flexible professional practice. This paper explores the extent to which this shift has substantivelyaltered the nature of social work practice with older people.It outlines key theories of professions and their applicabilityto social work, and critically analyses the impact of the ‘newmanagerialism’ within social services departments. Thepaper also examines the nature of social workers' practice witholder people following the impact of community care legislation,and concludes that the impact on the social work professionhas been to locate an increasing control of practice with socialwork managers, with potentially serious consequences for thecontinuation of a distinctive social work role in relation toservices for older people.     

Decision Making in Child Protection

Correspondence to Dr Ray Jones, Director of Social Services, Wiltshire County Council, County Hall, Bythesea Road, Trowbridge, Wilts BA14 8LE Summary A survey was undertaken of 701 decisions in ‘child protection’;and ‘child-care’ cases within one local authority.Decision making at four filter points in case career was analysed.Filter 1 was when the case was initially referred to socialservices, Filter 2 was when consideration was given to holdinga case conference, Filter 3 was when a case conference was held,and Filter 4 was the review case conference following the initialcase conference. The major risk factors which determined decisionswere highlighted, and these were different at each filter level.The percentage of children who remained within the ‘childprotection system’ after decisions were taken at eachfilter level was analysed and recorded. The research found that,based on the risk factor weightings given by the independentauditors, workers were appropriately discriminating between‘child protection’ and ‘child-care’cases.     

The Impact of the First Term of the New Labour Government on Social Work in Britain: The Interface between Education Policy and Social Work

Summary This paper considers how far the New Labour educational policyrepresents a clear shift in focus from the policies of the Conservativeadministrations of the 1980s and 1990s. As in other areas ofsocial policy, the paper concludes that current government policyowes as much—if not more—to ‘New Right’ideology than to that of the ‘Old Left’. With anew emphasis on social inclusion, the paper considers the contributionof, and implications for, contemporary developments in educationpolicy and practice for child and family social work in general,and education social work in particular.     

Informal Welfare, Social Work and the Sociology of Welfare

Summary This article seeks to inject some important but neglected considerationsinto discussions about the nature of informal welfare and thenotice social workers should take of it. Following a sketchof how both sociology and social policy have regarded informalwelfare, it is argued that a sociology of welfare which is sensitiveto the definitions held by participants indicates that socialworkers would be wise to seek to ‘tap’ informalwelfare very cautiously. It is also argued that such sociologyneeds to be accorded a more prominent place in social work trainingcourses.     

New Labour, Social Justice and Children: Political Calculation and the Deserving-Undeserving Schism

Correspondence to: Barry Goldson, Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, The University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK. E-mail: b.goldson{at}liv.ac.uk Summary Within a context of national prosperity and relative economicstrength, poverty and inequality is rife in the UK. This paperconsiders the broad contours of such social injustice, beforesharpening the focus to examine the specificities of child poverty.The New Labour government has made an ‘historic pledge’to end child poverty within a generation. The paper traces thekey policy initiatives that are being directed to this end and,by drawing on the latest research evidence, it attempts to assesstheir early impact. Whilst it is acknowledged that the government'ssocial justice agenda has made some progress in ‘tackling’child poverty, it is further proposed that a more rigorous redistributiveapproach is required if substantial and sustainable improvementsare to be made. Furthermore, it is argued that the social justiceagenda is conditioned by wider political calculations, whichlimit its scope. In this way the imperative to be seen to be‘tough on crime’ has meant that policy responsesto children in trouble have taken a distinctive and increasinglypunitive form. By developing the argument that New Labour'selectoral ambitions have led it to re-engage with a specious‘deserving’ ‘undeserving’ conceptualdichotomy, the paper assesses the implications for the treatmentof child ‘offenders’ in particular, and the broadersocial justice project more generally.     

Risk and Supervision: Social Work Responses to Referred User Problems

Correspondence to Peter Burke, Department of Social Work, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX Summary This study examines social work responses to users followingcase allocation of the initial referral. The aim of the studyis to demonstrate the need for supervision of social workersdealing with cases which have in common an inherent quality,described as ‘risk’. The study also links referralsto other practice responses identified as ‘service delivery’and ‘advisory’ work. The relationship between theseparticular responses is tested against the outcome decisionreached on case closure. All referrals were allocated betweentwo fieldwork teams over a one-year period and a total of 312referred cases was allocated within the categories mentioned.Findings are indicative that more ‘risk’ type referrals,however defined, are resolved with additional supervisory inputthan without, and that lower status workers favoured ‘middleground’ decisions of outcome when compared to their seniorcolleagues. A consideration resulting from this research isthat agency definitions of risk are different to the type ofrisk which requires crisis intervention. The question of riskto the user or to the agency requires the workers concernedto be able to discriminate between such cases. The implicationfor team training is that supervisory input should clarify thenature of risk, if any, and the task required of the workerfollowing case referral. The matching of skills which wouldultimately be the objective of this type of research cannotbe finally determined until a more comprehensive set of parametersfor practice is identified. This study shows that the responsecategories used demonstrate some basic supervisory needs ofthe worker.     

Evaluation with One Eye Closed: The Empiricist Agenda in Social Work Research

Please address requests for reprints to Peter Raynor, Centre for Applied Social Studies, University College of Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. Summary This paper was originally presented at a conference on ’theeffectiveness of social work‘ at Swansea in 1981. It arguesagainst a narrowly empiricist model of evaluation in socialwork, suggesting that while such a model may help to improvethe technical efficacy of methods, it can tell us little aboutthe desirability of the goals towards which our methods aredirected, or the social functions which they serve. The finalsection points to some possible resources for rational discussionof areas which ’scientific‘ models of evaluationtend to neglect.     

Social Networks and Social Service Workers

Correspondence to Peter Sharkey, School of Law, Social Work and Social Policy, Liverpool Polytechnic, 98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5UZ. Summary ‘Networks’ is a word often used in the discussionof social work practice and within social services departments.It was a word which was central to the Barclay Report (1982)and important within the more recently published Griffiths Report(1988) on community care. It is a word also known to sociologistsand anthropologists through the development of ‘networkanalysis’. There is, however, a fairly wide gap betweenits use within social work and its use within social science.This article tries to explore this gap and the ways in whichsocial science ideas might have some use and relevance to socialservice workers. It does this by using some illustrative datafrom a study done of the personal networks of thirty elderlypeople who were all clients of a social service district office.     

Child Abuse, Social Anxiety and Welfare

Summary This article attempts to locate the ‘moral panic’concerning child abuse within the context of broader changesin the material conditions and ideological forces in Britainin the early 1970s. It argues that the development of a senseof social anxiety amongst certain sections of the populationand the appeal of the New Right were crucial in the processof establishing the problem as the major issue for social workers.As a consequence social workers have been constrained into amore punitive and interventive relationship with children andfamilies, particularly the poor. The analysis illustrates thatthe way social workers experience role conflict and tensionin this area of their work reflects much wider historical andcultural confusions and contradictions.     

Comparative Hypothesis Assessment and Quasi Triangulation as Process Knowledge Assessment Strategies in Social Work Practice

Summary Despite a debate lasting some decades, there has been littleor no clear resolution about the way knowledge may be relatedto practice. To a considerable degree this is because of anassumption that knowledge is ‘knowledge as product’:given knowledge, researched and applied to practice. In recentyears, the concept of ‘knowledge as process’ hasemerged, focusing on knowledge of rigorous ways to think aboutpractice situations. This has generated a focus on hypothesisgeneration, testing and falsification, as well as lessons tobe learned from rigorous methods of qualitative analysis insocial research. Rigorous social workers, it has been suggested,would behave like ‘practical qualitative researchers ofthe individual instant’. However, there is little empiricalresearch on the matter. This paper evaluates process knowledgeforms used by social workers. It presents findings that socialworkers vary considerably in the extent to which they develophypotheses about the whole case, or aspects of it, in the depthwith which they analyse cases, and the systematic way they pursuean information gathering strategy. The paper concludes thatthere is clear evidence of social workers behaving as practicalqualitative researchers, but the rigour with which they do sovaries, with fundamental implications for the training process,and the extent to which rigorous strategies, along the linesof research methodology, should be taught.     

A Critical Perspective on Quality within the Personal Social Services: Prospects and Concerns

Correspondence to David Watson, Glasgow Caledonian University, Room W109a, Hamish Wood Building, City Campus, 70 Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 OBA, UK. Email: d.watson{at}gcal.ac.uk Summary This paper considers the development of ‘quality’within the personal social services over the last decade. Inparticular, it locates ‘quality’ within a managerialdiscourse, which de-politicizes and minimizes the critical aspectsof the concept in order to increase organizational scrutinyand control through the use and development of performance measurement.It is in this critical context that the prospects and concernsfor recent policy initiatives such as the Labour Government's‘Modernising Social Services’ are considered. Itis the contention of the paper that the critical and empoweringaspects of recent policy developments and quality approacheswill be minimized, as they are subsumed into activities whichare presented as technical and value-free. Further, that unlessthis process is critically questioned and challenged by managersand other stakeholders ‘quality’ and its developmentwill lead to greater proceduralization, increasing bureaucracyand ultimately commodification of the work processes.     

The Field Social Work Implications of Residential Child Care

Summary The workloads of field social work staff vary markedly, andlittle is known about the ‘burdens’ imposed by differentgroups of clients or cases. The research study reported hereset out to examine the extent to which field social work involvementin residential child care varied between individual childrenand to attempt to explain that variation in terms of the characteristicsof children, the characteristics and workloads of staff andtheir teams, the packages of services received by children andtheir families, and some general features of the residentialplacements. Field social worker involvement was measured interms of the number of contacts between ‘caseholders’and ‘case’ and the total amount of time spent onthe case over a three month period. The observed variationsin these two indicators were found to be significantly associatedwith the characteristics of cases and other factors. Indeed,these characteristics explained almost two-thirds of the variance.The empirical results have a number of policy implications whichare discussed under six heads: supply constraints, caseloadweighting, fieldwork organization, coordination and monitoring,out-county placements and travelling time, and comparative costings.     

Euthanasia: Israeli Social Workers' Experiences, Attitudes and Meanings

Correspondence to Dr Ronit D. Leichtentritt, Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. E-mail: ronitl{at}post.tau.ac.il Summary Sixteen social workers in Israel were interviewed about theirexperiences with and attitudes towards various forms of euthanasia,as well as the meanings they ascribe to them. Using phenomenologicalanalysis, seven themes were identified, emphasizing individual,interpersonal, organizational, social and therapeutic considerations,and suggesting a holistic and integrative structure of the phenomenon.The themes were arrived at by identifying distinctions and similaritiesbetween different forms of euthanasia. Two themes suggestingsimilarities were revealed: ‘diminishing the value oflife’ and ‘a call for help’. Three themeswere found to distinguish between passive euthanasia (withholdingand withdrawing life-sustaining treatment) and active forms(active euthanasia and assisted suicide): ‘legality’,‘social acceptance’ and ‘concern for the sickand dying’. The last two themes distinguished betweenwithholding treatment and assisted suicide, on the one hand,and withdrawing treatment and active euthanasia, on the other:‘the involvement of others as executor’ and ‘thepublicity of the act’. Further research and training isrequired to better inform social workers in this ethical area.Given their unique position, social workers should activelyparticipate in legal, social and therapeutic discussions concerningend-of-life decisions, for the benefit of clients, their familiesand health-care providers.     

Swimming with Dolphins: The Assessment Framework, New Labour and New Tools for Social Work with Children and Families

Correspondence to Dr Paul Michael Garrett, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. E-mail: paul.garrett{at}nottingham.ac.uk Summary Local authorities, in England, implemented the Framework forthe Assessment of Children in Need and their Families in April2001. The Framework is the first ‘official’ standardassessment model intended for use in the initial assessmentof all ‘children in need’ under Part 111, section17 of the 1989 Children Act. This new ‘conceptual map’needs to be understood in terms of previous policy documentsand earlier technologies of intervention related to child protectionand, more broadly, child welfare. However, it also needs tobe more expansively perceived, fixed and located as it relatesto other elements in New Labour's political ‘project’.The Framework's preoccupation with an ecological approach toassessments and with questionnaires and scales are likely tohave major implications for social work practice and for micro-engagementswith children and families.     

Social Adjustment: The Design and Use of an Instrument for Social Work and Social Work Research

Please address correspondence and reprint requests to: Dr. R. Corney, General Practice Research Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London SE5. Summary This article discusses some of the problems encountered whentrying to assess social adjustment and describes a standardizedsemi-structured interview designed to measure social adjustmentand dysfunction. The interview can be used by social workersas a research tool, a screening device or in making an assessmentThe interview is composed of items grouped under the three headingsof ‘Material conditions’, ‘Social management’and ‘Satisfaction’. Ratings are made on a four-pointscale by interviewers standardized in its use. The interviewwhich takes 40 minutes to one hour to administer, covers housing,finance, occupation, social and leisure activities, and relationshipswith significant individuals in the subject's life.     

The State of Welfare

Summary The word ‘welfare’ is difficult to define becauseit combines within it a range of ideologies and actions. Twoconclusions are drawn from this: first, that social servicesshould be regarded as contributors to, but not providers ofwelfare; second, that the study of social work and social administrationshould be concerned not only with the relationship of ‘service’to ‘need’ but also with societal movements and pressureswhich determine the emergence of both. The article reviews theprofessed values of the welfare state, particularly ‘socialequality’ and the problems associated with its achievement,namely public attitudes, and the discontinuity between intentionand practice in the welfare services. The implications for socialwork education and practice are considered.