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Measuring quality in communication is imperative for social work education, practice and research, but what does it take? This article describes the challenges faced by social workers in developing a set of scales and a coding framework for measuring quality in statutory social work communication between social workers and vulnerable young people. By sharing and reflecting on our experiences, we hope to offer other colleagues support in performing a similarly challenging task. A large body of filmed meetings from six different municipalities formed the basis for developing and testing the scales. All meetings between participants in the research process were taped, analysed and combined with field notes and coding results to identify the different challenges. The research process underlined not only that quality in statutory social work communication is a complex and context-dependent phenomenon but also that the process of quantifying and coding can generate new insights into the phenomenon. The analysis identifies that the quantitative translation of statutory social work communication created four different key challenges: ‘Struggling with context’; ‘When theory does not match reality’; ‘Unforgivable mistakes’; and ‘The relativistic no man’s land’.