Exploring emotional aspects of care and control in social work with children and families - a single case analysis of conversation

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore how emotions are displayed and dealt with on a communicative level in face-to-face encounters between social workers and parents in a child welfare setting. The analysis draws upon detailed analysis of a whole encounter between a social worker and a parental couple who have recently had their new-born daughter placed in foster care. By examining the way emotional stances are expressed and responded to I discuss how orientations toward institutional tasks and goals create constraints for the display, recognition and validation of clients’ emotion displays. I consider the communicative challenges this poses for the parents and the social worker and the implications these may have for the client–worker relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion in interaction
• institutional interaction
• social work
• child welfare
• conversation analysis
• care and control

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The embodied resources outlined in the transcript are from the author’s field notes. Since the encounter was not captured on video these observations do not qualify as data from a CA perspective. They are therefore not used as central focus of the analysis, although this would arguably have been relevant for the subject matter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sabine Jørgensen

Sabine Jørgensen is Lecturer in Social Work at University College Copenhagen and Research Fellow in the National Research Centre for vulnerable children. She has worked as a social work educator for 8 years and has previously worked as a social work practitioner. Her graduate work centered on relational and communicational aspects of decision-making processes in child welfare in the light of the authorities’ capacity to take action without parental consent. Her current research interests are client-social worker interactions in child and family welfare settings which she studies on the basis of audio and video recordings using conversation analysis.