Social worker decision making and parental responsibility

Abstract

This study sets out to explore the way that child care social workers make decisions about interventions in families, and in particular about the ways that they apply the concepts of parental responsibility, of working together with parents, and of social work duties. It begins with a discussion of current arguments in this field, recent legislation, government guidance and reports, and then moves on to look at some other research studies in the field. It considers that there is a dearth of studies which examine how social workers themselves make sense of their work in this area.The study is conducted by means of loosely structured interviews with 40 local authority workers, at the point where they are having to recommend a course of action to children's hearings and to child protection case conferences. It uses an inductive type of analysis in an attempt to understand the workers' own contextual reasoning, but which at the same time makes possible the construction of a typology of the way the concept of responsibility is applied, and the ways that they work with parents and make use of statutory measures.These workers define their social work problems in terms of layers of contexts. They almost invariably explain both the condition and the behaviour of children in the context of the attitude and behaviour of their parents towards them. In doing so they transcend the grounds of referral and the conventional case type categories. In the same way, they try to place the behaviour of parents in the context both oftheir personal limitations and of their life experiences. Despite this the social workers reveal strong value positions, particularly about the overriding importance of emotional care, that parents are responsible for their behaviour towards their children, and that the explanatory context, though it may constrain their actions, does not absolve them of responsibility for them.The type of intervention they plan is explained by the way that they have defined the problem. They are less likely to work in a supportive or consensual way with parents whose behaviour is seen as part of a pattern or habit of life rather than to be explained by their emotional condition or overwhelming life experiences. The latter are conceived as victims as well as the child. They are also less likely to do so with those who don't share their moral and cognitive understanding of the problem, or show commitment to dealing with it, or with those who show persistent hostility and condemnation towards their children, or where the child's condition is regarded as severe. Severity is a dimension of poor emotional care as well as physical.Perhaps as a reflection ofthe sampling point chosen for the research most ofthese workers propose some form of statutory measure, although it is not always clear how this relates to their definition of the problem or to their type of intervention. Their purposes vary, but discussion oftheir reasons reveals the difficulty many of them have reconciling their paramount duty to the child with working collaboratively with parents. The study concludes with a discussion about the findings, and what they have to say about the practice of child care social work in this field.