Lel Meleyal

Nudging social workers towards interpretive vigilance: approaches supporting management of conduct in the workplace

ABSTRACT In the UK, Government Inquiries into health and social work failures have burgeoned ever more bureaucratic regulatory mechanisms for managing the conduct of professionals. This article draws on the concepts of nudge theory and interpretive vigilance to consider the impact upon the social work profession of mandatory registration (licence) with a regulatory body. The author’s earlier UK-based empirical qualitative study found that, as a regulatory method, registration had perverse consequences contrary to its purpose. A secondary analysis of data identified ‘nudge’ points that encouraged social workers to engage proactively with conduct issues in the workplace. Risks caused by both active and passive failures of ‘interpretive vigilance’ by social workers, who had witnessed concerning conduct of other professionals in workplaces, were identified. Criticisms of nudge theory as ethically dubious are considered in relation to the transparency of nudge interventions. It is proposed that, in the context of international concern about the inefficiency of regulation, nudge theory may be a low cost, light touch, local approach to encouraging social workers to exercise interpretive vigilance to conduct-related risks and to take active collective ownership of conduct management in the work place.

Who are the people in my life? towards tangible eco-maps

Eco-Maps, diagrammatic assessments of family relationships, are used by social workers in individual and family contact to understand the subjective experiences of both supportive and disruptive family, friendship, and community relationships. In this paper we present the first phase of the development of the People in my Life app. We have developed a tangible version of Eco-Maps to unlock the potential of eco-maps in the digital domain and to enhance social work practice with children and young people. The central idea is to develop an improved, technology-based means to assess relationships that supports and enhances social work practice and foregrounds children and young peoples experiences. In particular, the project has three aims: (a) to collaboratively develop with social workers an application for creating eco-maps using touch-screens with tangible objects, (b) to test its usability with children, in the first instance, and (c) to provide a first exploration of the psychometric properties of parameters captured by the app.