Writing in social work professional practice 2014-2018

Lillis, Theresa and Leedham, Maria and Twiner, Alison (2020). Writing in social work professional practice 2014-2018. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-853522

The production and use of written texts is a high stakes activity in professional social work, playing a central role in all decisions about actions and services for people and at the same time used to evaluate social workers' professional competence. However, little empirical research has been carried out to date on the writing demands and practices of everyday social work and their changing nature given the range of technologies being used. The research project ‘Writing in professional social work practice in a changing communicative landscape’(WiSP) is an ESRC-funded research study involving five local authorities in the UK, exploring both the range of written texts produced and the writing practices of social workers. The research centres on three main domains of social work - children’s, adults’ generic care and adults’ mental health. The main objectives of the study were to: 1. Offer a detailed description and analysis of the texts and writing practices in professional social work, identifying key problems, solutions and challenges. 2. Develop an innovative theoretical approach for researching professional social work writing by bringing together the fields of New Literacy Studies, genre studies, discourse studies and studies of the 'written record' in contemporary bureaucracies. 3. Advance methodologies in the field of writing research by integrating ethnographic, corpus and process approaches. 4. Establish strong stakeholder engagement in all stages of the research that will lead to specific interventions in social work practice and training and contribute to policy debates about recording practices in social work. The project uses an integrated language methodology, including ethnographic description, discourse analysis using corpus software and the detailed tracking of the production of texts, in order to: map the types of writing that are required and carried out during the course of everyday practice; quantify the amount of writing that is being done and explore how writing is being managed alongside other commitments; identify the technologies mediating specific writing practices and the extent to which these enable or constrain effective writing and communication; track the trajectories of texts relating to specific cases; identify the writing challenges that social workers face, the problems identified and solutions adopted.

Data description (abstract)

Data collection consists of the following 5 datasets: a) 4,570 texts of social worker writing (casenotes, assessment reports, emails and miscellaneous 'other') collected constituting a corpus of just under 1 million words. A list of the most 100 frequent words, a word cloud of key semantic domains and selected concordance lines are also provided. b) 81 semi-structured interviews undertaken with 65 social workers and 6 managers focusing on the core participant interview questions. Interviews with a further 8 additional participants - with service managers and directors, a welfare rights worker and a student social worker - focusing on specific issues were also recorded and transcribed. c) 10 weeks of researcher observations comprising fieldnotes of social workers' activities (‘daily observation chronologies’). d) 483 days of social worker writing activity logs detailing writing and other activities undertaken. e) 42 text clusters. Each of these gives a summary of a social worker case plus associated texts (casenotes, emails, assessment reports).

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