Tor Slettebø

Collective participation in child protection services: partnership or tokenism?

This article explores how collective participation can help involve service users in the improvement of child protection services. Results from the action research project ‘User participation and professional service in the child protection services’ provide the basis for our discussion. Two of several initiatives in the project aimed at collective user participation undertaken in cooperation with two child protection centres in Norway are presented: a dialogue-based participation group for youths in child protection, and a group for parents who have lost custody of their children (the ‘User Group’). The initiative for young people resulted in changes in the practice of the child protection centre, and the User Group provided the parents with the opportunity to influence child protection services. The findings suggest that there is great need to further investigate models for collective user participation in order to provide service users with the power to influence service delivery.

Challenges of participation in child welfare

ABSTRACT The intention of this article is to discuss conditions for developing participatory relationships with children in child welfare services (CWS). In recent years, child protection and CWS have seen a growth of interest in children’s participation, but research shows that children often do not participate when their families are in contact with the CWS. Participatory practice tends to be more messy and complicated than the policy rhetoric suggests. Discussion about the reasons for lack of children’s participation has mostly been related to the social worker’s competence or willingness to involve children in participatory practice. In our research, we have found that social workers are interested in involving children in participation, but that they often meet with organisational structures and material design of offices that represent barriers to children’s participation, for example, to children’s access to information and help, and to the development of relationships with children over time. In this article, we will discuss how organisational structures and routines, and material design, present challenges for implementing participatory practices in child welfare, and what will create appropriate conditions for children’s participation.

International travelling knowledge in social work: an analytical framework

Social work has a shared international identity but is also diverse and context specific. There is increasing interest in the international movement of knowledge to national and local contexts but at present there is little analysis of how and why this happens. Instead of seeing knowledge as ‘transferred’ in a straightforward export–import relationship, attention needs to be paid to how knowledge is assembled, mobilised, circulated, reformulated and reassembled as it travels from one country to another. Drawing on neo-institutionalism, a comprehensive framework is proposed that may serve as a heuristic for researching and analysing international travelling knowledge in social work. It includes nine elements: narratives, routes, barriers, boundaries, filters, providers, shape, roots and issues/topics.

Factors affecting user participation for elderly people with dementia living at home: a critical interpretive synthesis of the literature

ABSTRACT Professional caregivers are expected to facilitate user participation for people with dementia. At the same time, an increasing number of elderly people with dementia are now being cared for at their homes. Research is scarce on user participation for people with dementia, especially for people with dementia who live at home. This article aims to systematically and critically review the factors affecting user participation for elderly people with dementia living at home from the viewpoint of the patients, family caregivers, professional caregivers and researchers. A systematic literature search and critical interpretive synthesis were conducted. The search yielded 1,957 articles. In total, 112 full-text articles were retrieved, of which 27 met the inclusion criteria. Five broad analytical themes were identified during the analysis: individual characteristics, professional caregiver characteristics, decision characteristics, relational characteristics and organisational characteristics. The results show that the value placed on user participation can differ between family caregivers and professional caregivers. People with dementia still experience stigmatisation, preventing user participation, and relations with both family and professional caregivers play a key role in enabling user participation for people with dementia.

Programmes crossing borders: the international travelling of programmes in social work

The influence of evidence-based policy and practice is increasingly found in the field of social work. Using Multisystemic Therapy (MST) as a case, this article explores issues arising from the travelling of programmes to settings that are different and distant from those of their origin. While such travelling is often accompanied and facilitated by narratives of positive findings in effectiveness trials, it can be argued that effectiveness and efficiency are influenced by contextual conditions and therefore the informational value of such trials is limited. Accepting that there are epistemic and practical limits to the idea of a universal effectiveness of a certain programme, the travelling of programmes is not necessarily a case of the ‘best ideas’ being adopted and such travelling therefore requires critical examination. Decisions on programme adoption should be based not only on effectiveness trials, but also on knowledge about the generic elements of (alternative) programmes as well as on knowledge about contextual conditions including the needs of local service users and gaps in local service provision.