Talk and interaction in social work
Description
Talk and interaction in social work is a central area of research at the Department of Social Work. The group members investigate institutional interaction across welfare contexts, and a recurrent focus is how professionals and clients understand each other and perform various conversational tasks, such as investigating, supporting, or informing. Research in the group tends to be conducted in collaboration with organizations that encounter social problems and a key question is how professionals and clients manage difficult conversations. Our findings are often used for organizational development or communication training at collaborating organizations, effectively contributing to the development of professional practice.
Activities and research networks
The research group is a basis for collaborative research projects and recurrent activities are data sessions and discussions of manuscripts and grant applications.
Data sessions are held every second week withing The Conversation Lab, which is an interdisciplinary, conversation analytical group that is jointly organized by the Department of Scandinavian Languages, the Department of Pedagogy, Didactic and Sociology of Education, and the Department of Social Work. The responsibility for The Conversation Lab alternates between these three departments. During 2024, the data sessions are coordinated by Marie Flinkfeldt at the Department of Social Work.
Through its members, the research group is part of the working group ‘Conversation analysis and social work’ (CASW) within the European Social Work Research Association (ESWRA). This international network organizes seminars, data sessions, workshops and conferences every semester. Among other things, CASW has produced a special issue on talk and interaction in social work in the journal Qualitative Social Work as well as three international online conferences. Ongoing activities include an edited collection on conversation analysis in social work, where several of the research group members will contribute chapters
Collaboration
The research is primarily conducted in collaboration with public authorities and other organizations, for example:
- Mind
- The Swedish Social Insurance Agency
- Fellow on Call
- Priest on Call
- Uppsala municipality
Such collaboration typically means that research projects are designed to ensure that they respond to the needs for new knowledge both within social work as an academic discipline and within the collaborating organizations looking to further develop professional practice. In most cases the research also forms a basis for communication training, seminars and other dissemination of findings within the collaborating organizations.
Teaching
The research group is deeply involved in teaching conversation and communication courses at the Social Work programme. In addition to lecturing and giving seminars and practical communication training to students as part of such courses, published research from the group provides a foundation for both the contents and forms of teaching. The edited book Conversation in Social Work: A Conversation Analytic Perspective (Iversen & Flinkfeldt, 2022) gathered several of the group’s members and is used as course literature in the course Conversation and Communication in Social Work. We have also crafted research-based workshops and produced anonymized training resources based on our empirical research. This was done within a pedagogical development project grant (PUMA) from Uppsala University.