Practice Nearness: a goodenough principle for social work research

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Practice Nearness a good-enough principle for
social work research?

• Lynn Froggett and Stephen Briggs
• Psychosocial Research Unit,
• University of Central Lancashire
• Centre for Social Work Research
• University of East London

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ESRC Funded seminar series

• Practitioner Research and Practice Based Methods
• Psychosocial and psychosocietal approaches
• Narrative and Biographic methods
• Visual, observational, ethnographic
• Research on clinical practice
• Individual and organisational case studies
• Evaluation, consultancy based methods and action
  research

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Current Dilemmas in Methodology

• whether and how to combine quantitative and
  qualitative research paradigms
• how to combine a good ethnographic eye with
  interpretive distance
• how to move beyond an over-reliance on verbal
  text-based data and work with the visual and
  other sensory repertoires
• how to represent the quality of subjective
  experience without losing analytic rigour
• how to depict the complexity of changing lives
  and moving organisations
• how to work with service users through the
  research process

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• How to notice things
• How to notice ourselves noticing them
• How to write about them so people notice
  themselves within what we say

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Ethical principle of practice-near Research

• Recognition
• Seeing the other as an equivalent centre of
  Subjective Experience

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Obstacles to Recognition

• actuarial assessment of needs and risks,
• forensically driven regulation,
• governance and audit premised on mistrust of the
  inherent relationality of human services

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The Bromley by Bow Centre Research and Evaluation
Project 2002-5

• Multi-method qualitative study
• Lynn Froggett
• Prue Chamberlayne
• Tom Wengraf
• Stef Buckner

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Research/Evaluation Aims

• Characterise the implicit B3 model of care
• Do it through lens of work with older people
• Evaluate it against its explicit aim of providing
  integrated services in health and social care

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Bengali Older Mens Luncheon Club
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Community Care project
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complex moving object

• the organisation, the personal biographies of
  people whose lives were changed by it,
• processes and relations within it,
• its projects, stories, art-work, and history,
• its principles of operation and emergence
• and its means of cultural transmission.

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Methodological Emergence

• Mapping Exercise
• Observation of organisational process
• Biographical interviews
• Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders
  (internal and external)
• Participatory action research
• Participant observation diary (everyday
  interactive order)
• Organisational myths and stories
• Observation and analysis of art-work
• Focussed round table evaluations of projects
• Short reflective interviews on the setting and
  art-work,

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Model of Social Citizenship

• The individual of post-neo-liberal active
  citizenship who is responsible for their self
  care thus limiting the burden they impose on the
  state
• A view of the citizen as a defended and desiring
  subject with a complex inner life and imaginative
  resources

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The Creation Myth

• A small community arts project starts without
  any authorisation in a run-down church-hall with
  a history of eccentric artistic priests. The last
  a semi-vagrant dropped dead in the pulpit. The
  frail elderly congregation recruit an new
  minister a life-force - rebellious of church
  and state bureaucracies alike. He throws open
  the windows to see what flies in. A Latin
  American woodcarver turns up, a boat-builder, a
  shoe-maker. All are honoured, all contribute
  according to their means. The Centre emerges and
  grows through the creativity of its members.

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Contrasting Subjectivities

• the mythical entrepreneur virile, risk-taking,
  charismatic, innovative, abrasive , narcissistic
  - a hyper-active rugged individualist.
• The carer - a quiet self-deprecating
  inventiveness that locates creativity in the
  collective
• The vulnerable subject -passive and dependent but
  honoured within an interdependent community

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GPs making stained glass for their surgery
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What we learnt

• Value of methodological pluralism, flexibility
  and emergence
• Attention to explicit and tacit order
• Theories of the subject
• Capacity for interpersonal recognition
• Ethnographic thick description and attention to
  cultural forms and artefacts
• Visual, verbal and other sensory repertoires