From stories to standardised interaction: changing conversational formats in social work

Abstract

Structured decision-making, which often uses standardised assessment instruments, is seen as a way to improve the quality of social work. One such instrument is the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), which is used widely in Nordic social work. The main aim of this qualitative study, which was conducted in Sweden, was to investigate how standardised interactions are handled in an institutional context using the sociology of standards as a theoretical starting point. An ethnographic approach was used in which research material was collected at three sites, namely two social service offices and one probation office. Specifically, eight standardised interviews were observed and transcribed. The analysis suggested that the standardised ‘instrument’, with its predetermined tick-box questions and answers, both instructs and restricts the interaction for the social worker and the client. Thus, it can be regarded as a powerful actor that creates an agenda. To make the interview less like an interrogation, the social worker and the client found ways to manage their interactions, which mainly stayed on-track, with the questions and answers following the standardised interaction order. However, off-track interactions were needed for the interview to progress, and this was accomplished using face-saving activities. These results indicate that a ‘database logic’ is embedded in these instruments and that a factual discourse is constructed, thereby reducing the complexities of social work. As a conversational format, standardised interactions in social work restrict stories, which ought to be considered when new standardised assessment instruments are designed and used in social work.

Keywords:

• Standardised assessment instruments
• decision-making
• ethnomethodology
• sociology of standards
• narrative

Notes

1. Most probation officers in Sweden are social workers, so they are referred to as such in this article.

2. However, research has suggested that official statistics diverge from real life, and there is a tendency to overestimate how often the ASI instrument is used (Abrahamson and Tryggvesson 2009). Social workers adapt the statistics requested by the Swedish authorities to make local outcome measurement performance appear more favourable (Carlstedt and Jacobsson 2017).