Responsive understanding from within conducting social investigations in social work

1. Responsive understanding from within conducting social investigations in social work

   Ann-Margreth E. Olsson

   This is about an action research study exploring dialogical coaching in social work in Sweden. The clients, one another and others. The investigating social workers had traditionally been trained to seek neutral approach and external clarity (cf. Bakhtin, 1986). In the study the social workers started to invite the children to participate as partners in conducting the social investigations. This created increased mutual involvement in dialogical interplay. When the social workers addressed the children, inviting the children and their families into a mutually involving dialogical participation, exploring and inquiring about both the risks and the strengths of the responsive understanding (cf. Bakhtin, 1986, 1991, Shotter, 2004), that is, getting an understanding from within the family s perspective.

   In dialogical conversation it becomes easier for the social worker to be invited into the narratives of the child from within the child perspective when the child has been invited to participate and his/her requests about and choices in the participation are respected. Hearing the voice of the child, in the way the child chooses to speak, gives the social worker an idea of the of v of Bakhtin about how every unique speech experience is shaped and developed in continuous hem their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re- Bakhtin, 1986 p. 89).