Decision making and user involvement in child protection cases in a Norwegian context

Background and purpose: User involvement is fundamental to work with child protection cases. The child and their care givers have formal user rights in relation to actively participate in the decision making process, and the... [ view full abstract ]

Background and purpose:
User involvement is fundamental to work with child protection cases. The child and their care givers have formal user rights in relation to actively participate in the decision making process, and the social worker is obliged to always pay attention to their opinions. Based on my PhD project about decision making in child welfare services in a Norwegian context I will discuss how the social worker in a child protection case involve the child’s parents in their work.
I will pay special attention to how the social worker’s relational work in meetings with the parents influence the trajectory and development of a case. Specifically I will focus on the situations where the child’s parents and the social worker have different views on what the child’s problem is. Many possible stories about the child’s situation then emerge, and what story to be considered as valid is the result of negotiations. The purpose of this paper is to show how relational work is part of a professional “tool-kit” used to convince and sometimes persuade parents to agree with the social worker. Relational work is then to be seen as a negotiation strategy, a kind of “politics of representation”, more than a strategy for user involvement.
Methods:
In my project, decision making is studied as a cultural practice, and the basis for my analysis is one year of fieldwork in three different municipal child welfare services in Norway, four months in each child welfare service. Transcriptions from observations and field notes from participant observation in three different kinds of working situations constitute the empirical data material in the dissertation. Findings from my observations in one of these situations, the client-meetings, will be presented here.