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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]

Covid-19 has led to renewed public support for public services. Frontline workers symbolize a renewed ideal of public service ethos (PSE), though little attention has been paid to how the public managers delivering vital services interpret and mobilize PSE. We show how PSE is implemented by public managers reflecting their local contexts. We examine the theoretical roots of PSE and challenges by newer theories of public management before illustrating its contemporary manifestations through three case studies of local government responses to Covid-19 in England, showing how PSE has been adapted in current contexts and continues to inform public management practice. [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]

Relationship-based practice has become an influential theory through which social work practice is understood. However, much more critical attention needs to be given to the kinds of relationships involved. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of long-term social work that spent 15 months observing practice with service users and organisational life to find out how social workers establish and sustain long-term relationships with children and parents in child protection cases, or don't. The paper introduces into the literature the concept of a 'holding relationship', which was present in several of the cases we studied, especially where therapeutic change occurred. The aims of the paper are to document the nature of a holding relationship and to develop it as a concept. A 'holding relationship' involved social workers being reliable, immersing themselves in the service user's day-to-day existence and developing their life-skills, getting physically and emotionally close to them, and practicing critically by taking account of power and inequalities. The concept of a 'holding relationship' draws on psycho-dynamic and sociological theory to provide new ways of thinking that can help make sense of the practical and emotional relating involved in social work and promote the development of such helpful relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorises adult-child touch in residential child care as a relational practice, contributing to an emergent literature on residential child care, and conceptualises residential child care as a Lifespace. It responds to an on-going debate surrounding the use of touch in the sector, which has attracted academic attention since the early 1990s as a result of abuse scandals, the ensuing 'no touch' policies and a growing body of research identifying touch as an important aspect of child development. The paper draws upon a six-month ethnographic study of residential child care, which was explicitly designed to observe everyday interactions between residential care workers and young people. The findings suggest that touch cannot be discussed in isolation from either relationships or a contextual understanding of relationships in the specific context of residential child care. The study found that touch is unavoidable, relational and that dichotomous understandings of touch continue to present issues for both theory and practice. [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]

While recognition that some service users do not want social work involvement has grown in recent years, little research has explored what relationships between social workers and 'involuntary clients' look and feel like in practice and how they are conducted in real time. This paper draws from research that observed long-term social work practice in child protection and shows how relationships based on mutual suspicion and even hate were sustained over the course of a year, or broke down. Drawing on a range of psycho-social theories, the paper adds to the literature on relationship-based practice by developing the concept of a 'hostile relationship'. The findings show how hostile relationships were enacted through conflict and resistance – especially on home visits – and how anxiety and other intense feelings were often avoided by individuals and organisations. Much more needs to be done to help social workers recognise and tolerate hostility and hate, to not retaliate and to enact compassion and care towards service users. [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]

When the COVID-19 pandemic brought life in Washington, D.C. to a standstill in March 2020, staff at DC Public Library began looking for ways to document how this historic event was affecting everyday life. Recognizing the value of first-person accounts for historical research, staff launched Archive This Moment D.C. to preserve the story of daily life in the District during the stay-at-home order. Materials were collected from public Instagram and Twitter posts submitted through the hashtag #archivethismomentdc. In addition to social media, creators also submitted materials using an Airtable webform set up for the project and through email. Over 2,000 digital files were collected. This article will discuss the planning, professional collaboration, promotion, selection, access, and lessons learned from the project; as well as the technical setup, collection strategies, and metadata requirements. In particular, this article will include a discussion of the evolving collection scope of the project and the need for clear ethical guidelines surrounding privacy when collecting materials in real-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]