‘Between a rock and a hard place’: Challenging encounters between disability service clients and workers

ABSTRACT

Professional relationships in the health and welfare sector involve many challenging client encounters. This study aims to describe what kind of client interaction social service workers in disability services find challenging and how they rationalise and manage these challenges. The study investigates disability service workers’ perceptions of challenging client interactions using data from 22 interviews with disability service workers in two hospital districts. Interviewees highlighted lack of mutual trust and lack of shared understanding as two issues arising in challenging communicative behaviours that disability service workers find burdensome and miserable. The interviewees’ accounts referred to four aspects of these challenges: 1) individual, 2) third-party, 3) structural and 4) experiential. In addition, six different management strategies were identified: 1) adjusting interaction, 2) listening, 3) negotiating, 4) problem solving, 5) withdrawing and 6) encounter interruption.

KEYWORDS:

• Challenging encounters
• client-social worker relationships
• interpersonal conflict
• interviews
• social services

Acknowledgments

The present article is part of Hanna Nykänen’s doctoral dissertation that is prepared under the supervision of Associate Professor Leena Mikkola from the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication at Tampere University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hanna Nykänen

MA Hanna Nykänen is a doctoral student in Department of Language and Communication Studies in University of Jyväskylä. She is preparing doctoral thesis focusing on client-worker relationships in the social services. Her research interests include discourses, workplace relationships, relational dialectics theory, communication theory of identity and well-being at work.