Sidsel Natland

A study of coordinator positionings in family group conferences

Although the coordinator is essential in mobilizing and remobilizing the social network of individual participants during the family group conference (FGC) process, we lack knowledge on the coordinators’ meaning and their interaction with various FGC actors. The data in this study come from nine interviews with FGC coordinators conducted as part of a randomized controlled study in which FGCs were implemented in two Norwegian municipalities: Oslo and Bergen. Positioning theory is used as an analytical tool for interpreting the findings. The results indicate that it is a challenge for coordinators to maintain the ideal of the ‘neutral’ coordinator while building trusting relationships with participants. Coordinators’ strategies for managing these challenges are interpreted as discursive positionings that enable communication, trust and participation, potentially securing FGC as an empowering process for the participant. The results indicate that coordinators are crucial actors in carrying out the FGC process.

The working relationship between social worker and service user in an activation policy context

Abstract Recognition of the human relationships as a means of creating change and development is fundamental to social work. However, the shift in European welfare policy in the 1990s redirected the objective of social work towards policy goals of work and activation outcomes. It is debatable whether this activation context influences the social worker/user relationship regarding social work ideals such as empowerment and user involvement. This qualitative case study of encounters between social workers and users enrolled in a Norwegian activation programme explores their interaction as a working relationship. By focusing on the doing of social work, our aim is to identify how social workers approach users in their efforts to develop relationships that meet the programme’s required goals of work, activation and user involvement, and what their approach means for the development of working relationships. The findings show that social workers pragmatically utilize approaches ranging from bureaucratic to person-centred, thus carrying out social work practice on a continuum between coercive and empowering practices. The study identifies these practices as purposive working relationships, and suggests that they should be acknowledged, as they underpin how social work in an activation context can be implemented without compromising social work ideals. Furthermore, this study indicates that a pragmatic practice should be regarded as a strength because it acknowledges the complexity of social work practice and the importance of recognizing how social work is co-constructed in the social worker/user interaction.

Service Users' Self-Narratives on Their Journey from Shame to Pride: Tales of Transition

As part of a course on changing attitudes developed by KREM, a Norwegian service user organization, narratives are used to explore and understand identity formation. The process is based on the role of shame in the lives of those whose life experiences lead to a reliance on government social benefits to sustain themselves. Shame is identified as an obstacle that affects everyday life and undermines ones capacity to take actions that can lead to and support self-sufficiency. Exploring oneself through the construction of the fairy tale can provide service users with a renewed sense of empowerment. Using identity formation and the concept of shame as the conceptual framework, this analysis focuses on the use of narratives to construct and interpret stories. It concludes with both practice and research implications of using narratives to acquire an understanding and sensitivity to service user perspectives.

Conflicts and empowerment – a processual perspective on the development of a partnership

ABSTRACT Partnership working involving providers and users of social services is highly valued as a means to inform research and practice, yet its effectiveness is debated. Frameworks for measuring and evaluating partnerships are developed, but still there is a need to shed light on micro-practices to gain insight in how partnerships succeed or fail to reach their goals. The context for this qualitative study is a Norwegian governmental funded program, where one goal was promotion of structures for equal collaboration between social work education, research, social service providers and users. The study investigates one local partnership project and how conflicts influenced processes and outcomes. Conflicts were related to the leadership of the group. With a particular look at users’ participation, the findings indicate how emergence and negotiations of conflicts were related to their empowering processes as the project developed. The study underscores the importance of acknowledging conflicts and how these may be complex and interwoven with empowering processes when users are involved, as well as the need to critically examine issues on leadership. The study supports the importance of ethnographic studies in order to understand how a partnership might deliver, as this approach enables enhanced understanding of micro-practices and internal power dynamics.

Learning Practice-Based Research Methods: Capturing the Experiences of MSW Students

ABSTRACT The literature on teaching research methods to social work students identifies many challenges, such as dealing with the tensions related to producing research relevant to practice, access to data to teach practice-based research, and limited student interest in learning research methods. This is an exploratory study of the learning experiences of ten MSW students involved in a yearlong research methods course that utilized research data in a research unit located inside a school of social welfare and facilitated by doctoral level project coordinators. Based on hands-on experiences related to data analysis, interpretation of findings, and report writing, three themes emerged from the students’ learning experiences: interaction between research and practice, research supervision, and peer collaboration. These themes provided the foundation for identifying the facilitators and obstacles of learning and engagement that inform the study’s implications for integrating student learning based on the use of agency data that can inform agency practitioners through participatory approaches to learning.

Dialogical Communication and Empowering Social Work Practice

How to succeed in facilitating for empowering processes within social work practice is a central topic in both theoretical discussions and regarding its principles in practice. With a particular focus on how dialogical communication can play a part in order to practice empowering social work, through this text the author frames HUSK as a project facilitating the underpinning humanistic approaches in social work. Dialogical communication and its philosophical base is presented and recognized as a means to achieve empowering social work as well as highlighting the importance of the humanistic approach. The author also underscores how HUSK projects in themselves were enabled because of the required collaboration between service users, professionals, and researchers that signified HUSK. This is pinpointed as having potential for a future research agenda as well as pointing at how the outcomes of the projects may impact future social work practice when the goal is to conduct empowering social work.

Hvorfor skal pasienten medvirke i forskning

User participation was introduced as a key public instrument in Report no. 41 (1987 – 88) to the Storting, Health policy towards the year 2000: National health plan. The health policy goals included increased democratisation, user empowerment and legal safeguards. Questions regarding how services could be developed to meet patients with respect and empathy were highlighted, giving rise to a need to collect user experiences. In turn, this helped acknowledge user experiences as valuable knowledge for the health services, and included the patients’ subjective knowledge, their perspectives and perceptions of reality. In medical and health research, this may help supplement the perspectives of clinicians and researchers. This has led to new forms of knowledge production: participantbased research, user-involving research, co-research, collaborative research, usercontrolled research. Instead of undertaking research on or about patients, research is undertaken jointly with them (1). We feel, however, that there is a need to discuss what this kind of knowledge production implies at the level of philosophy of science. By way of an introduction, we will therefore elucidate some viewpoints regarding where and how such knowledge is produced. We will then proceed to discuss how user participation may affect knowledge production.