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Supervision is a core component of professional support and development in social work. In many settings, and perhaps particularly in children's services, it is valued as crucial in safe decision-making, practice reflection, professional development and staff support. Research has demonstrated that supervision and staff support also contribute to social worker retention in child welfare services. Drawing on data gathered in a 15-month ethnographic, longitudinal study of child protection work that included observations of supervision, we were able to observe the impact of supportive supervisory relationships on social workers' decision-making about staying in their current workplace. This article presents a single case that demonstrates the potential impact of effective relationship-based supervision on retention and calls for a more humane approach to social work supervision against dominant managerial themes that have increasingly burdened the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supervision is promoted as an essential element of effective professional practice in social work. Its benefits include promoting reflective social work and assisting with the management of the emotions generated in challenging practice. This article reports on the observations of supervision in a 15-month ethnographic study of social work teams on two very different sites in England, one using hot-desking the other a small team design. Our findings show how supervision is constituted by temporal, spatial and relational elements and that some current organisational designs do not create the ideal environment for reflective supervision to flourish. Far from providing an opportunity for containment of challenging emotions, supervision was sometimes a source of stress. It was experienced as reflective and containing where managers were accessible and space was made for thinking in a context of openness that encouraged regular deep conversations about current work. By experiencing the atmospheres of supervisory encounters and organisational cultures, this study has enabled us to produce new insights into the embodied nature of supervision as it is lived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the empirical process of research highlights substantive findings, understanding the methodological approach in which access is gained and sustained on field sites is also an integral part of the data. Gaining access in ethnographic studies, in particular, is a complex task which requires researchers to continually negotiate systems and processes in order that they may reflect on the socially embedded practices of their chosen fields. However, once the researchers are accepted, the ethnographer then has to be aware of the effect their presence has on the field and that access is a continual process of negotiation and contestation. Based on a longitudinal study, which conducted a 15-month ethnography in two social work organizations, this article will explore the dilemmas various members of a research team experienced when trying to blend into the different sites. And then, once having achieved their desired position, the challenges they encountered when they realized that their presence was affecting the performances of their participants. We conclude by discussing the importance of reflexivity, power and ethics. Ethnographic research may be a more natural way for researchers to collect data, but it is also a method which positions researchers in situations, where they can easily influence encounters and, in effect, become part of the findings as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into social work and child protection has begun to observe practice to find out what social workers actually do, however, no such ethnographic research has been done into long-term practice. This article outlines and analyses the methods used in a study of long-term social work and child protection practice. Researchers spent fifteen months embedded in two social work departments observing organisational practices, culture and staff supervision. We also regularly observed social worker's encounters with children and families in a sample of thirty cases for up to a year, doing up to twenty-one observations of practice in the same cases. Family members were also interviewed up to 3 times during that time. This article argues that a methodology that gets as close as possible to practitioners and managers as they are doing the work and that takes a longitudinal approach can provide deep insights into what social work practice is, how helpful relationships with service users are established and sustained over time, or not, and the influence of organisations. The challenges and ethical dilemmas involved in doing long-term research that gets so close to social work teams, casework and service users for up to a year are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social work in the United Kingdom is preoccupied with what social workers cannot do due to having limited time to spend with service users. Yet remarkably little research has examined what social workers actually do, especially in long‐term relationships. This paper draws from an ethnographic study of two social work departments in England that spent 15 months observing practice and organizational life. Our findings show that social work some of the time has a significant amount of involvement with some service users and the dominant view that relationship‐based practice is rarely achieved is in need of some revision. However, families at one research site received a much more substantial, reliable overall service due to the additional input of family support workers and having a stable workforce who had their own desks and were co‐located with managers in small team offices. This generated a much more supportive, reflective culture for social workers and service users than at the second site, a large open plan "hot‐desking" office. Drawing on relational, systemic, and complexity theories, the paper shows how the nature of what social workers do and culture of practice are shaped by the interaction between available services, office designs, and practitioners', managers', and service users' experiences of relating together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]