PARTICIPATORY APPROACH TO SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH

Participatory Approach to Social Work Research

Participatory Approach to Social Work Research

Introduction

The most effective consultations are those in which consultants most directly acknowledge and perhaps respond to customers' problems and concerns. In addition, for patients to be committed to taking advantage of advice they must agree with both the goals and methods proposed. A landmark publication in the United Kingdom was Meetings Between Experts, which argued that while consultants are the experts about corporate and political problems in general customers and voters are the experts on how they themselves experience these problems. General practitioners do not behave in a uniform way. They can be categorised as slow, medium, and fast and react in different ways to changes in consulting speed. They are likely to have differing views about a widespread move to lengthen consultation time. We do not need further confirmation that longer consultations are desirable and necessary, but research could show us the best way to learn how to introduce them with minimal disruption to the way in which patients and practices like primary care to be provided. We also need to learn how to make the most of available time in complex consultations.

Devising appropriate incentives and helping practices move beyond just reacting to demand in the traditional way by working harder and faster is perhaps our greatest challenge in the United Kingdom. The new primary trusts need to work together with the growing primary research networks to carry out the necessary development work. In particular, research is needed on how a primary care team can best provide the right balance of quick access and interpersonal knowledge and trust.

When one looks at the literature, we see a blossoming landscape of ethics, which is semantically innovative, used economically, and politically arguable. Presented linguistically and sometimes already established as morality in technology, business ethics, bio-ethics and until now appearing only in the form of neologisms such as theory-ethics, Cybern Ethics, aesthethics and gene-ethics. Economically rewarding, one finds morality as something for consultants to invest in. Politically speaking, morality is often assiduously taxed, as most recently in the discussion for and against the Iraqi war.

Ethical imperatives are very current for business, and increasingly ethical questions, concerns and limitations are also being discussed in relation to scientific research, especially in the fields of gene technology and brain research.

Here I will focus on the topic of ethics of responsibility, i.e. on the ethical acting of the social worker. However, the professional group of social workers in Germany seems to be immune regarding the topic of its own professional ethics, at least when one looks at the professional literature, browses through the respective magazines and attentively listens to conversations among colleagues. It seems to me that, aside from some exceptions, German social work is little touched by questions regarding ethics. By comparison, social workers in the US and the Netherlands have succeeded in coming up with a “code of ethics”, recognized by its professional ...