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Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-qsw-10.1177_1473325021990875 for “Depends who it is”: Towards a relational understanding of the use of adult-child touch in residential child care by Lisa Warwick in Qualitative Social Work

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-qsw-10.1177_1473325021990875 for “Depends who it is”: Towards a relational understanding of the use of adult-child touch in residential child care by Lisa Warwick in Qualitative Social Work

Limited research demonstrates that social workers have been using social media to gain another view of service-users’ lives through observing their Facebook pages. While it is known that such practices occur, no empirical research has shown how Facebook is actually used in casework with families and under what circumstances. This article uniquely fills this gap by drawing on an ethnographic study of child protection social work practice in England that involved 15 months of participant observation at two sites. Our findings show that the use of Facebook by social workers was commonplace in risk assessments and on-going casework and took two forms. Some social workers proactively initiated searches of service users’ Facebook sites, a practice prevalent in literature on the use of social media in social work. But we also found that some used Facebook because they were unwillingly ‘drawn into’ acting on information that was presented to them by others, an aspect of social media use that is not covered in the literature. Some social workers were clearly opposed to any usage. This article employs a framework of two opposing ethical positions to describe what we observed: Kantian, where such use was seen by practitioners as invasive of privacy and unethical; and Utilitarian, where it was justified as ethically defensible because it helped to keep children safe. Given our unique research insights, we argue that social work must pause to consider the ethical implications of these practices in depth, before they become even more institutionalised.