Taking time seriously

As the new editorial team for Nordic Social Work Research, our primary aim is to strengthen the position of the journal in the field. Among the strategies for doing so, we first aim to reduce the backlog of articles in press waiting for publication and to establish a clear set of processes for effective journal management and promotion.

Nordic Social Work Research is a collaborative effort between Nordic and international boards, as well as Nordic and country-level FORSA. We have taken several steps towards more effective journal promotion. Considering the important role Nordic Social Work Research plays, we are currently working with Taylor & Francis to establish an impact factor. We are closely involving editorial members from both the profession and academia, as the journal directly reflects and reflects upon the Nordic profession of social work. With this, the new team is also working to make the review process more efficient. In addition to printing two special issues this year, we have for this year reduced the article backlog by doubling the number of articles in all regular issues published. In the coming year, we will work closely with our national and international editorial boards and FORSA in developing a smoother editing process. We will be the Nordic journal that actively speaks for and critically reflects upon the profession.

Second, as noted in the editorial in March 2022 (Thoresen et al. 2022), we aim at increasing the methodological breadth of the literature published. We will also continue to publish studies focused across both global and local, Nordic levels. For instance, earlier issues of Nordic Social Work Research have explored how social work practice is conducted within various institutional settings (Nissen and Eriksson 2016) and organizational contexts (Eriksson and Nissen 2016) and the implications this has for those service users receiving and/or encountering these services, as well as vulnerable social groups more generally. This scholarship aims to better understand service provision and how such provision has transformed to meet the needs of users, given their everyday life contexts. The central focus has been on how changing organizations and systems shape the person in the situation today.

Relevant to our editorial goal of ‘taking time seriously’, the social work literature has begun to more broadly analyse how aspects of temporality shape the provision and experience of social work. Dialectically, this literature also explores how changing service experiences in turn shape understandings of time and temporality, both for social worker and service user. This ‘temporal turn’ approach brings together a discussion of the global and the local by focusing across experiential levels and across immigration and welfare systems. Within a recent issue of this journal, Mulinari (2021) describes the ‘temporal border practices’ that take place in the ‘policing of time’ experienced by unemployed women who are positioned between the migration and unemployment systems. Mulinari’s article analyses the gendered and racialized nature of such a policed temporality to show how this creates a second – more ‘flexible, patient and disposable’ workforce. Several articles have applied a focus on temporality by taking up the idea of biographical circumstance (Gubrium and Leirvik 2022), exploring the intersections between change through the life course and changing systems through time, enabling focus on the ‘person in the changing situation’. In a recent article, Hansen and Gubrium (2021) explore how the impact of social work programming – in particular, labour activation programming – might be analysed with focus on encounters between changing welfare systems and between service users who actively construct meaning through reference to changing personal histories over time. In a follow-up article, the same authors (Hansen and Gubrium 2022) take the analysis of temporality a step further, applying an in-depth rhythm analysis that explores how service users’ everyday life course rhythms meet with and diverge from the institutionally defined labour activation rhythms, and how this intersection shapes the way that users understand their labour activation experiences. Nordic Social Work Research aims to publish articles that feature similarly methodologically innovative perspectives on and analyses of social work and social work practice.

Along these lines, the articles published in this issue provide a great testimony to an enormous diversity and variety of methodological approaches used in social work research. This refers both to the types of methods used and research participants involved in the studies. In this double issue, we publish a total of 14 articles, in addition to a book review. Reflecting our focus on research methodology, Askheim focuses on the issues that may arise when applying methodological strategy of including service users as co-researchers and how to make the most of varied forms of collaboration. The author suggests that we must recognize the different competencies brought by different actors into the research process.

The issue also includes a number of articles focused on social work and social care practice, with a specific focus on the terms of employment of social workers, the discretion they apply and the way in which the practice of care is approached. Kivistö & Hautala use a qualitative, case study approach to describe how an increasing consumerist–managerialist discourse has introduced new dilemmas in the practice of social work, exploring social work practice in the context of case-based social work with people with disability in Finland, using Giddens’ structuration theory. Nordesjö, Ulmestig and Denvall use a focus group approach to investigate the implementation of a tool for street-level bureaucrats use to cope with tensions between standardization and individualization within income support (IA) in Swedish social services, finding different coping strategies used between different actors in the services. Barck-Holst, Nilsonne, Åkerstedt and Hellgren conduct interviews as part of a longitudinal trial of work-time reduction, to explore its impact on the work–life balance of Swedish social service staff. Fjetland and Miroslava Tokovska employ a qualitative systematic review to provide an overview of what sorts of support and understandings characterize social support interventions that provide useful services for next of kin for those with dementia. Andersson uses a focus group approach to explore how issues related to language use informs and challenges work practice from the perspective of bilingual social workers in the Swedish social services. Freysteinsdóttir and Brink use a quantitative, questionnaire to describe which social workers in Iceland experience emotional and/or physical violence in their job perpetuated by clients and what sort of violence is most frequent. Finally, Lindhom, Reiman and Keväjärvi use an interview approach to explore the perceptions of informal caregivers of children with special needs in Finland concerning their safety and health challenges, finding that issues are both often related to the terms of their own work as practitioners.

The issue continues with three articles focused on the issue of violence against children and youth. Karlsson applies a quantitative, logistic regression to case files to describe the connection between parent birthplace and risk of entry into the child welfare system in Stockholm, as well as to discuss potential empirical support for the risk model and the bias model for explaining the over-representation. Korkmaz, Överlien and Lagerlöf use a mixed-methods study to explore youth Intimate Partner Violence in Sweden, providing both incidence rates and associated factors for victimization. Thunberg draws on narrative interviews to analyse how young people who have been victims of crime in Sweden construct their need for support, and what they perceive as supportive.

Finally, the issue includes three articles focused on the tools and trials that may improve service. Härd, von Greiff and Skogens use interviews to explore the usefulness of a recovery, capital-based assessment tool in a Swedish alcohol and drug treatment context for professionals in a Swedish alcohol and drug treatment context. Anderberg, Forkby and Thelin investigate the first-phase implementation of a Scottish model for supporting child well-being, Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) on policy reformation flow and transformation, both between and within countries, with a specific focus in a Swedish county. Kaasbøll uses both individual and group interviews to assess an inter-agency collaboration model from the perspective of service providers, factors that promote and hinder effective inter-agency collaboration around early identification and follow-up of mental problems and disorders among youth in residential care.

The issue ends with a book review, in which Veronica Ekström discusses Women, Vulnerabilities and Welfare Service Systems, Edited by Marjo Kuronen, Elina Virokannas and Ulla Salovaara and published by Routledge in 2021.

We are grateful for these engaging contributions and are excited to continue to publish and promote important research through Nordic Social Work Research.