Editorial

The editorial is being written in the unusual circumstance of a global pandemic where many academics are getting used to varying degrees of lock down, depending on their particular government’s decisions about how much they feel justified in asserting their authority over the private lives of citizens. For many this has included isolating themselves and their families in their own homes for the sake of the greater good, avoiding contact with as many people as possible, and thus preventing further spread of the current virus and the danger of serious illness or death. The long-term impact on University staff of the sudden massive development of virtual teaching methods remains to be seen. By contrast, the practitioners, carers and service users who are more closely implicated in practices of ethics and social welfare are obviously more likely to be seriously affected by the virus. There is also plenty of evidence that large numbers of people who are members of various oppressed social groups are not only in greater immediate risk, but in addition, they are at risk of suffering in the long-term as a result of the inevitable major economic downturn. The loss of employment and disruption of businesses, small and large, has thrown huge numbers of people onto welfare and health organisations that have been systematically slimmed down into second class public services by neo-liberal governments across the globe. Women, the working class, minority ethnic groups, the disabled and older people are all disproportionately affected: there will not be any shortage of ethical issues for readers and authors associated with this journal to consider. However, this pandemic is not the first and is unlikely to be the last. Some commentators are speculating about how the shock of the pandemic experience might change people’s attitudes to social welfare, with governments having to resurrect ideas about the importance of investment in public services and more than minimal government involvement in social life. Time will tell whether this kind of development will be significant or not: readers (and editors) of this journal will no doubt be watching closely. It will be interesting to see whether one of the consequences will include contributions to this journal that reflect on these circumstances.

In this issue of the journal, there are two papers and a conference report concerned with ethical issues in research processes. This has been a continuing topic since the journal started and clearly remains an important practical and theoretical matter for many if not most of our readers. However, the first paper in this issue is an unusual study by Marian Barnes, a former editor of this journal, whose contact with a small residential community operating in the UK led her to reflect on how its values and functioning could be seen from the perspective of the ethics of care. The community offers hospitality and support to people with addictions, mental health problems and other troubles, offering hospitality to people of all faiths or none. Marian conducted a series of oral history interviews at the time of the community’s 60th anniversary, and used a feminist care ethics to analyse the evidence of care in action in this remarkable setting. The article makes connections between care for the community and care for members of the community, arguing that this offers a valuably different perspective from an emphasis on individualised care – perhaps of some relevance to communities worldwide sharing and trying to minimise the pain of the pandemic whilst individuals simultaneously suffer the social and health consequences.

The second paper is by a group of 6 academics who have studied the apparent disproportionate number of complaints made about social workers in England to their regulators, the Health and Care Professionals Council (HCPC) – as compared with the other health care professionals, also controlled (at the time of writing) by the HCPC. This is the second paper we have published examining complaints about social workers to this body, (see Leigh, Worsley, and McLaughlin 2017). This particular paper discusses findings from interviews and focus groups that formed part of a mixed methods study aiming to find out the reasons for complaints, but also to consider strategies that may reduce complaints. Four themes were identified in their research, some of which would probably be echoed elsewhere, others may not be. In the UK social work is not a highly respected profession and has suffered from media attacks as a result of child abuse scandals. Consequently, they identify a need for public education regarding the role and function of social workers. Exactly how far social work is an evolving profession will vary between countries, but both this factor and the inevitably challenging nature of social work practice are causes affecting the level of complaints against social workers that may be more universal and also not easily remedied. It would be very interesting to be able to compare the outcomes of these analyses with similar studies from other countries: we would welcome contributions to this discussion.

The first of the papers on research ethics is by another team of researchers who are concerned about the development of ethical researchers as well as researching the practice of ethical social work. Like other researchers they have found the process of ethical approval time-consuming and bureaucratic with no guarantee of its relevance to ethical issues that may arise later in the research project. They, therefore, stress the importance of developing researchers who may be enabled to assess ethical issues as they arise, and act in an appropriate manner. This has to be a critical issue in social work research and in this paper, the authors provide suggestions for strategies to achieve this end for both researchers and partners.

The second paper on research ethics is the outcome of a plenary paper delivered at a conference held at the University of Durham. It is followed by a report of this conference co-written by a number of the participants. The title of McLaughlin’s paper speaks for itself - its topic is: ‘relational autonomy as a way past the zero sum debate over whether children have enough capacity to be participatory research actors’. As she says there has been a marked increase in the active involvement of children and young people in social research, including involvement in shaping its focus and design. Indeed there have been previous papers in this journal about this topic. One, for example, is by Willumsen, Hugaas, and Studsrød (2014), and is critical of the trend to involve children, querying whether they can have enough capacity to enact sufficient individual agency to justify their participation in research. By contrast, McLaughlin, using concepts from the ethics of care, draws from notions of relational autonomy to argue that what children and young people need in order to be participants in research is the creation of spaces within which their relational agency can be nurtured and sustained. She contends that both capacity and vulnerability are socially produced, and that it is possible to create the spaces necessary to nurture the agency of children and young people within participatory research. Such an argument deserves serious consideration, and is another example of how the ethics of care is having a wide influence on the theory and practical application of ethical concepts in social work.

The final paper, as indicated, is a report on the conference from which McLaughlin developed her paper. Sui Ting Kong and her colleagues at the conference describe the discussions that took place, but the focus is different from the paper by McLaughlin. This report draws on discussions in a workshop where attenders were looking more broadly at Participatory Action Research with a wider range of groups of people whose voice is restricted or not sufficiently heard, and their potential for autonomy is at issue in ways that are both similar and different from that of children or young people. However, the issues of capacity and relational autonomy were central to all the discussions and particular aspects were discussed in smaller groups. What becomes very clear, and is no doubt recognisable by researchers across the globe is the difficulty and complexity of ethical practice in research with the range of service user groups in health and social care.

The final paper in this issue is in the Ethical Issues in Practice section of the journal where we place work by a variety of authors including students and service users as well as academics, writing about ethical issues of practical importance and relevant to social welfare. In this issue, we publish the winning postgraduate entry in the 2019 Jo Campling student essay prize by Francesca Ribenfors who explores new ways of thinking about the ethics of developing a literature review during doctoral study. She questions what kind of knowledge the literature review values, recognising that the knowledge of oppressed groups is often marginalised in the way literature reviews are constructed. She argues that reimagining the literature review as a ‘community of knowledge’ and drawing on a variety of sources and voices contributes to the integrity of the thesis, as well as enabling the literature review to be a space in which dominant discourses are challenged. It is to be hoped that undergraduate as well as postgraduate students – and others – will read and reflect on the ethical implications of her paper for their own writing.

In this issue, it is pleasing to note that former editors of the journal such as Marian Barnes and Sarah Banks are still making contributions to the journal, and the present editorial team are grateful to them and to all the contributors to this issue. We are also appreciative of guest editors who help to produce special issues of interest to themselves and to our readers. We are currently looking to develop further special issues and we are inviting interested academics to get in touch for informal discussion: advice and help is available to guide the process. Please email the editors at the journal to discuss possible special issue topics.