A conversation analytical approach to Social Work encounters in Portugal

The present dissertation investigates how Social Work is locally accomplished through social interaction between professional social workers and clients seeking institutional support for managing problematic situations hindering their own and/or their relatives’ well-being and autonomy. On the basis of a large corpus of video recordings of Social Work service encounters organized in four different institutions in Portugal, a series of analytical chapters examine diverse interactional activities routinely carried out by social workers and clients, from soliciting clients’ initial concerns to ensuring the continuity of the institutional relationship beyond the scope of the encounter, upon its impending termination, revealing how these activities are locally accomplished through social action.
Examining, in fine detail, how participants carry out key activities for the accomplishment of social intervention – gradually transforming an initial concern with a problematic situation into the formalization of institutional clienthood and its progression beyond the encounter at hand – the analyses reveal how these activities are carried out through a fundamental and pervasive interplay between participants’ orientation to an asymmetric distribution of tasks and knowledge, concern with the moral and institutional order, and focus in managing specific situations through institutional procedures.
Chapter 2 follows the unfolding of a single encounter, organized between a professional social worker and two clients seeking institutional support for their mother; here, a series of extracts will introduce some of the issues that the subsequent chapters will further focus on. Then, Chapters 3 to 5 investigate a series of procedures for assessing eligibility to care service, namely for identifying the situations for which clients seek institutional support, its relation with the social situation of the prospective care recipient, and the documental basis for formalizing clients’ application to institutional support. Finally, Chapters 6 and 7 examine activities related to the management of clients’ institutional careers, such as recommending clients how to pursue support in other institutions and closing the encounter so to make sense of how the institutional case is to progress beyond the scope of the encounter at hand.
Fine-grained transcriptions and detailed sequential analyses of the moment-by-moment unfolding of these activities demonstrate how, through the mobilization of talk, bodily action, and material objects, they are carried out by the participants in a contingent yet concerted and co-operative manner. Such a video-based conversation analytical approach reveals how Social Work emerges as the situated and embodied accomplishment of the participants, and hence offers a novel contribution to the study of Social Work practice.