How do you solve a problem like Maria? Family complexity and institutional complications in UK social work

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on UK data from an international, comparative project involving eight countries. The study examined how social workers’ conceptions and definitions of family impact on the way they engage with complex families, and how social policies that frame social work context impact on the way social workers engage with families. Focus groups were held in which social workers from four service areas (child welfare, addictions, mental health and migration) were asked to discuss a case vignette. Several factors were embedded in the vignette to represent a realistic situation a social worker may come across in their day-to-day work. Social workers clearly identified the complexity of the family’s situation in terms of the range of issues identified and candidate ‘causes’. However, typical first responses were institutional, looking for triggers that would signify certainty about their, or other agencies’ involvement. This resulted in a complicated story, through which the family was disaggregated into individual problem-service categories. This paper argues that understanding these processes and their consequences is critical for exploring the ways in which we might develop alternative, supportive professional responses with families with complex needs. It also demonstrates how organisational systems manifest themselves in everyday reasoning.

KEYWORDS:

• Child welfare
• family relationships
• sense-making
• decision-making
• qualitative research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Julie Walsh is a lecturer in sociology in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. Grounded in a long history as a Youth and Community Worker, her research interests include the ‘family’ and childhood, with a specific focus on migration. She is also interested in the impact of broader narratives – for example, policy and media narratives – on families living with precarity.

Sue White is professor of social work at the University of Sheffield. For the last two decades, her research has focused on the detailed analysis of professional practice and decision-making in child health and welfare in the context of organisational systems. She is currently conducting international research on social workers’ understandings of family complexity and also on technological biology and its impacts on social policy and public discourse.

Professor Kate Morris is head of department and professor of social work. She is also a qualified social worker and spent time in practice and policy development before becoming an academic. She led the research strand in the Child Welfare Inequalities, focusing on social work decision-making and local responses to families. She has researched extensively in the areas of child and family experiences of services, child protection practice and innovative models of service delivery. She is an academic advisor to the Care Crisis review (funded by Nuffield) and is part of an international team completing a comparative study of social work responses to families.

Paula Doherty was research fellow on the Family Complexity project. She is a researcher specialising in children and families social work research and her doctoral project focused on decisions and sense-making in child protection teams. She is currently a researcher at Lancaster University.

Additional information

Funding

This project, Family Complexity and Social Work (FACSK), is funded by New Opportunities for Research Funding Co-operation in Europe (NORFACE) as part of the Welfare States Futures funding stream.