Editors’ Choice Collection European Social Work Research
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The helping professions have long understood that secondary traumatic stress and its counterparts of burnout, compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are a problem for workers in the field. However, less is known about the impact of the issue on students who have placements. Using the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale (STSS), this quantitative research study seeks to explore if a convenience sample of 45 students on two programmes in the field was affected. The results show several non-significant results, suggesting that the number of weekly caring responsibility hours did not predict perceived STSS scores after placement and that high-scoring students have shown no significant difference in STSS scores before and after placement. Overall, we also found that the subsample of ten students with caring responsibilities had higher STSS scores. The article discusses well-being in students generally, incorporating trauma-informed perspectives. While no students in this study were affected, the discussion examines what can be done to better support students from an ecological perspective to protect and prepare them for their placements and future careers. Finally, this article calls for policy and practice in education and the curricula of the helping professions to routinely incorporate awareness of the issues in training and supervision.
In this article, we discuss the challenges in engaging with research participants from marginalised communities, including from some minority communities where there are interconnecting issues of poverty, racism, school exclusion, family breakdown and sometimes youth crime. This is aligned with experiences of developing research partnerships with local services in evaluation work. Two research case studies, from evaluation research with child and family social work and the youth justice system, discuss experiences of researching within inner-city areas, navigating researcher–practitioner relationships and maintaining ethical research standards. In both cases, entering the research field presented challenges related to sensitivities and distress experienced by participants. Our case-study discussions demonstrate how the researchers responded to risk and unwitting involvement with young people in conflict, in prison and experiencing family bereavement. Highlighted is the vital importance of local agencies providing accurate information about the families and young people that the researchers are asked to contact in order to ensure that respect and research ethics are upheld and no trauma is caused. Planning and building trust are key to ensuring that time is given for respectful engagement and that agencies are ready for ongoing support and follow-up as needed. The article will explore how these methodological considerations can be taken forward.
Over recent years, the number of refugee families with children fleeing to Europe has increased. Although reception centres in Europe are not equipped to host families with children, families nevertheless remain for extensive periods in these collective centres, where they lack autonomy, privacy, certainty and often even a sense of security. Drawing on 123 interviews with parents (58), children (38) and social workers (38) in nine collective reception centres in Belgium, we analyse how the Belgian asylum regime impacts refugee parents’ capacity to fulfil parental roles and responsibilities and social workers’ relationships with refugee parents. Our analysis points to a complex combination of declining parental agency yet increasing responsibility on behalf of refugee parents across different parental roles and responsibilities. This in turn leads children to take on what are typically considered ‘adult roles’, raising concerns about parentification among social workers. By introducing the term ‘institutionalized forms of parentification’, we call for a re-politicization of social work with refugee families. Moving away from common approaches to family relationships that focus primarily on the individual or the family system, our findings draw attention to the impact of social spaces, policies and cultural value systems.
This study explores recognition and misrecognition practices in encounters between parents in poverty and social workers trying to help them. The goal of the analysis is to understand how such practices can lead the actors involved to feel either included and valued or misrecognized and excluded, and which factors influence these possibilities. The research was carried out by administering qualitative interviews to 40 parents struggling with poverty and 27 social workers in eight Italian regions. The analysis identified four forms of recognition and misrecognition: negative recognition, invisibility, conditional recognition and mutual recognition. The first three ‘ethnocentric’ forms exclude reciprocity by denying recognition or generating instrumental forms of recognition, negatively affecting the helping relationship. Practices of mutual recognition are instead made collectively in interactions in which professionals not only express care for the other but also assume and treat the person as an autonomous individual who can take up a critical stance towards recognition practices and norms in the helping relationship. Recognition practices also emerge as a powerful tool for social workers to fight the vicious circles of misrecognition of parents in poverty; however, these relations need to be nurtured and made possible, through meso- and macro-level interventions as well.
This study set out to gain a better understanding of how family meetings are facilitated and experienced in an Irish rehabilitation hospital setting from the perspectives of interdisciplinary team (IDT) members, patients and their family members. This article reports the findings from IDT members’ perspectives. A critical-realist action-research approach was utilised that involved medical social workers (N = 15) and a social work academic. A quantitative, descriptive study design was adopted, which utilised a cross-sectional survey of IDT members. A total of 85 clinical staff responded to the questionnaire, of which 69 were fully completed. Four key themes emerged: pre-meeting engagement and preparation – a critical step; the impact of organisational structures; supporting participation; and mechanisms for effective family meetings. Findings indicate the importance of pre-meeting preparation, the mutuality of the relationships between participants, a standardised approach and the use of patient-centred and inclusive practices to achieve truly participatory family meetings. Family meetings involve complex processes in which mutual influence, context, preferences, values, information shared, the nature of the relationships involved and the communicative style of participants all play significant roles in both the process and decision-making outcomes. This study concluded that social workers are perhaps in a unique position to work with IDTs in clarifying the reality of the limits of choice and the involvement of the patient and family in rehabilitation hospital settings. In preparation for the role of family-meeting facilitation, the implementation of education and training programmes for IDT members is strongly recommended.
Migration studies often focus on macro-level analyses, emphasising political and economic factors while overlooking personal (micro-level) aspects, whereas social work offers valuable insights into the individual experiences and needs of migrants. Little information exists regarding the perspectives of highly educated migrant women, including about the economic, social and emotional aspects of their migration experiences. This article focuses on how the professional identities of highly educated women in novel sociocultural settings are formed and examines how their professional identities influence their integration. Using snowball sampling, qualitative interviews were conducted with 36 participants from the Netherlands, Slovenia and Germany, supplemented by field notes and a demographic questionnaire. Looking through the micro-level contributes to a better understanding of the everyday lives of highly educated migrant women and the importance of maintaining their professional identities in a new environment in the context of social work and migration. By intersecting gender and education, this article addresses the complexities and the significance of professional identity among highly educated migrant women and its influence on their integration process, highlighting their challenges while also emphasising potential integration strategies and social policies for better social inclusion.
